Honest Doubt

by Amanda Cross

  “Exactly,” she said, smiling at me the way she probably smiled at a smart student. “And remember, with professors, particularly in literature, they don’t feel quite certain that theirs is a manly profession. If women start swarming all over it, they might actually begin to feel feminized. But all that’s general, and probably true of other English departments in other colleges, although ours is a bit extreme. At least I hope so. You probably need to know about particulars.” She seemed to be deciding the simplest and quickest way to put it, at least for now.

  “These guys,” she said, “don’t like women; they particularly don’t like tenured women—that is, women with power—and they don’t want any more of them here. We had a great female assistant professor who was up for tenure—maybe you’ve already heard something about that.” I nodded. “They were so set on getting rid of her they used every crooked and ridiculous trick to keep her from being promoted. I fought for her, which of course made her even less desirable, and women in other departments argued with the administration. The students, who really liked her and knew how much attention she gave them, got up a petition. It was all for naught. They won, but I think in a way they lost. They will probably never admit it to themselves, but that victory cost too much. It certainly left me a lot readier to fight them, particularly Haycock. The muttering on all sides continued. They still have the power, but at the same time they began to see the writing on the wall and were scared. Not a happy situation.”

  “So the assistant professor left?”

  “She did. She had another year to go, but she didn’t want to stay and they didn’t want her to stay, so they gave her a semester’s pay as terminal leave and she left.”

  “Any chance she could have dropped the pills in Professor Haycock’s retsina?”

  “None. One of her prominent qualifications for promotion was that she was bilingual, French and English; she could read Italian and Spanish as well. She wiped the dust of the United States as well as of this college off her feet and settled down in Paris. She and I communicate via e-mail; she’s fine, if disillusioned about academia. But then, aren’t we all?”

  “It still seems a neat job to me,” I said. “You read most of the time; you talk about what you read, and people have to listen to you; you write about what you read. A lot less dirty than many jobs.”

  “Granted. And people who agree with you usually add that we get our summers off as well as sabbaticals, a semester every seven years—though that’s no longer as automatic as it used to be—and they can’t fire you except for the most egregious of reasons. Who’s to agree now on what that is? In the old days it was a lovely job on the whole. God knows, I wanted it. But now? It’s really nasty, in a way I’m told even business isn’t. There’s too little money, so dissension over which department gets funds to hire faculty gets more and more bitter. Worst of all, there aren’t enough jobs for the Ph.D.’s being produced, and that turns the whole process sour.”

  “I know something about that,” I said, remembering Kate’s rendition of the subject.

  “What’s really ironic is that the administration here and I’m sure elsewhere was in a panic when compulsory retirement for faculty was made illegal. My God, they said, we’ll have ninety-year-olds tottering around. Now, those old enough to draw their full pension and social security can’t wait to leave. Unfortunately,” she added with a shrug, “our ‘old boys’ are still in their late fifties or just a bit beyond. And the young-old boys are young, damn them.”

  I’d been taking notes, and now I looked up at her.

  “How I do go on,” she said, beginning to gather up her papers. “While the others may not be as frank with you, or may be too tired at the end of a long day to be succinct, they’ll all agree about the state of the department whether they tell you so or not; only the sides they’re on will differ.”

  “Don’t the men get as tired as you by the end of the day?” I asked, partly to make myself a bit less sympathetic.

  “If you want a blunt answer, it’s no. I may be a better teacher than some of them, but that isn’t the point. First of all, I’m the only tenured woman around, although the woman they canned took a lot of the weight of that off me. Then, the students these days are intrigued by feminism, even if all they want to do is sneer at it; they’re certainly interested in women and sex. Those students who are gay, men and women, gravitate toward me because I’m expected not to be homophobic, which I’m not. If some senior wants to write a thesis on homosexuality in any work from Chaucer’s on, he or she is sent to me. It is handy to assume that feminists understand these things. Well, most of us do, but why don’t they try a little? Also, I’m on too many administrative committees, put there so they can say there is a woman on board. God, how I really do go on. I actually am very tired. Sorry.”

  “I’m the one who ought to apologize for keeping you so late,” I said, rising to my feet, tucking away my notebook, and picking up my helmet. “Perhaps we can talk again sometime—maybe at lunch, when you’ve only had to make it through half a day?”

  “Anytime,” she said. “Unpleasant as the atmosphere is around here, it will certainly be better when this investigation is over. Have they definitely decided he was murdered?”

  “I think so, though there are far too many loose ends. Could I ask you just one more question for now?”

  “If it’s a short one,” she said; she was ready to leave with me, waved me out, and closed her office door behind her, locking it. We walked down the stairs together (“The elevator never comes, though I sometimes wait for it going up,” she explained), and she didn’t even ask me about my helmet. She was either very tired, or tactful enough to spare what she could guess had become a tiresome question.

  “What do you want to know that requires a very short answer?” she said when we were outside of the building. The wind had risen, and her hair was blowing. She pushed it back from her face.

  “What do you think of Professor Haycock’s”—I groped for a word—“devotion to Tennyson?”

  “That may be a short question”—she laughed— “but the answer could fill hours, if not days. All I’ll say for now is that if Tennyson were part of the motive in this investigation, you’d be detecting a different murder: mine.”

  Waving, she walked off in a determined way. I didn’t bother waving back, since she just kept looking ahead; I set off for the parking lot.

  The next day I called Dawn first thing in the morning; I wanted the name of one of the “good” young men, one of those Antonia had admired, who had been fired. I wanted, in addition to his name, his current address and his new job, if he had one. If she could find me an assistant professor, late of Clifton College, who was working on the eastern seaboard I would consider myself fortunate. Most of those fired, I gloomily suspected, were now employed in the Midwest, happy perhaps, but distant, too distant for a trip on my motorbike or by commuter train.

  But my luck was in. One of the young men fired three years ago had been hired by Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, where he also lived. Dawn gave me his home, office, and e-mail address, as well as his phone number. She had been forwarding mail to him until recently, and he still occasionally kept in touch. Profusely thanking Dawn for this information, I asked her again to have dinner with me. “You’ll be doing me a favor,” I said, before she could protest. “This is not an easy case, and talking to you helps to clear my mind. What kind of dinner would you like this time?” I asked.

  “Could we go to the same place?” she asked. “It was delicious and we could talk there; most restaurants are so noisy.” We made a date for a few days hence.

  The assistant professor, late of Clifton, now of Rutgers, responded to my call with more enthusiasm than I anticipated. This case looked like one of those, commoner to fiction than life, where the good guys are all on one side and the baddies are all on the other. This is not a situation conducive to sharp detective work; one tends to take sides and to become blinded by favoritism, as thoug
h the suspects were on teams.

  Richard Fowler, speaking from New Jersey, sounded so nice it was obvious why Clifton hadn’t kept him. He agreed to meet me in New York (“Any excuse to revisit that great city is welcome”) and told me he was a different man from the one I would have met three years ago at Clifton.

  “Do you garden?” he surprisingly asked. I denied any such inclination.

  “Well,” he said, “since settling in New Brunswick, we’ve taken up gardening. That is, my partner’s taken it up, and urges me to join in; physical and spiritual therapy, he calls it. I gave him a gardening book, and he read me this bit out of it that perfectly describes the English department at Clifton. The gardening expert’s describing something called tickseed—Coreopsis lanceolata, officially. No, wait a minute, there is a point to this story. The instructions for growing tickseed might have been internalized by the tenured faculty at Clifton as the way to treat inferiors. Hold on.” He must have reached for the book, because he didn’t leave the phone. “Tickseed, we are told, ‘prefers well-aerated sandy soil with some humus; but the soil should not be too good as the plant produces more leaves than flowers in fertile ground.’2 Not too good soil and us growing more leaves than flowers says it all, trust me.” We made an appointment to meet the next evening. “Don’t worry,” he assured me before disconnecting, “I won’t confine my evidence to horticultural metaphors.”

  We arranged to meet the next evening at Knickerbocker’s in the Village—booths (I reserved one) and more down-to-earth food than I ate with Dawn. It occurred to me that dinners were playing a bigger part than usual in this investigation, but of course I would count them as legitimate expenses, which they were, when I handed in my account. After all, I was dealing with academics.

  Once I’d made the appointment with Richard Fowler, I called Kate to see if I could stop in for a chat. I’d more or less gathered that late afternoon was drinky time around the Fansler establishment, and that intriguing chat might be welcome. I had to be careful not to overdo my welcome or to make my remarks less than interesting. But what I had to say to Kate wouldn’t be a worry to me this time. She couldn’t make it that particular afternoon, she said, but she could usually make it; I shouldn’t stop calling, especially since, as I’d seen, she would frankly let me know if it didn’t work out. I was feeling a bit let down, but maybe that was because everything about this case was confusing and not exactly getting anywhere.

  Richard Fowler was waiting for me outside of Knickerbocker’s, leaning against the entranceway. He seemed to recognize me as I walked up, and led me into the restaurant as though this were the very evening in his whole life he had been waiting for. I liked him with an immediacy rare with me when investigating murder cases, though I had to admit it was growing less rare with this case. Still, he seemed so much less tense than the academics I had met so far, less serious, more inclined toward fun or frivolity. They showed us into our booth, and handed us menus.

  “I can tell we’re going to get on,” he said. “I’m gay and you’re fat, and we’re both lovable. And we both understand that if I’m going to help you figure out who offed dreary old Haycock, it’s because I’m against murder in general, not his in particular.”

  It hardly required my fine investigative eye to discern that he was bursting to tell me what he thought of the English department at Clifton College, and that what he had to say was not likely to be modified either in tone or content. Everyone else I’d met during this case had been so restrained, or anyway so careful, that I felt wonderfully relaxed and hopeful. When the server asked us if we wanted a drink, Fowler said he didn’t feel like wine, could he have a vodka martini?

  I said sure, he could have whatever he wished, and I would have one too so that we could lift similar glasses to the afterlife of Professor Haycock. He immediately got the message that he could drink all he wanted on the lady detective, but that she would probably stop at one, being as it were in harness. An insightful chap.

  “I know,” he said to reassure me, “a little buzz is one thing, a cheery fog is quite another; you’re working.”

  “That’s it,” I said. I’d left the bike at home, as I always do for dinner engagements—what is dinner without some proper liquid accompaniment? With Dawn I could finish my half bottle of wine and keep up with her and her revelations; with Rick, as he asked me to call him, I hadn’t a clue what he would say or what I would want to ask, and I was grateful to him for realizing that.

  I was feeling a pleasant glow even before our drinks came. Well, why not? Within a few days I had met Kate Fansler and Antonia Lansbury, two women I was able to talk to on a more or less equal basis. Well, not equal, I guess, more from me up to them. This was a first for me. In my work I talked to a lot of men on what you might call a level playing field, but with women I almost always looked down on them at least a little—I admit it—and had to coax what information I wanted out of them with patience and skill that it had taken a lot of time to learn. Most of the women who came to me as clients were in trouble, hadn’t ever dealt with a private eye, and were reluctant to come forth with what was actually on their minds. I might feel sorry for them before I was through, I might despise them, but I wouldn’t expect to learn much from their particular personalities. Funny that I’d never thought of this before I met Kate and Antonia. Maybe there was something to be said for the academic life. Not, I reminded myself, that the men were likely to turn out to be any special gift or any different from men I’d met up with before.

  I gathered my wandering thoughts together as the waiter brought our martinis. We raised our glasses and clinked them together.

  “To the passing of the old order,” Rick said.

  “To the solving of this murder,” I said. He might have to live with the old order or the new, but I had a case to get moving on.

  “I don’t know who did for old Haycock,” he said. “If I did I’d tell you. It wasn’t me—and you mustn’t let that denial make you suspicious of me. I might kill someone; I don’t say I wouldn’t, and if I became murderous, someone like Haycock would be a likely victim. But I found it easier just to get out.”

  “Somehow I had the impression things had gotten worse in the last years. Were they always so tense?”

  “They sure were, while I was there. Look, baby, the place isn’t a university, it isn’t famous, it probably isn’t even notable. But those old codgers had a nice little setup. They did well by all the little lady students—it used to be all women until ten or fifteen years ago —and all of a sudden, people are questioning the old guys’ right to domain.”

  “Were they sorry to see the place go coed?”

  “No, tickled at first. Boys, young men, ho-ho, what we are doing is now significant. But of course the female students just loved listening to the wisdom sprouting from those wise heads, or pretended to. The boys weren’t so patient, and the girls weren’t either anymore. The women’s movement maybe, who knows why, but somehow the nest was beginning to unravel. And then the young faculty got uppity. My dear, the old boys fairly seethed. If I were a sadist, I would have stayed just to see them writhe.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  “No. I guess it was making me a little tense. My partner . . .”

  “The one who’s taken up gardening.”

  “The same. He said I was making him jumpy as hell, and that he wasn’t going to sit around and watch me turn into a nervous wreck when I had the chance to move to a better place in every way and one where we could have a house and a garden. I adore New York City—he and I used to live here and I commuted to Clifton—but he’s a country lad. So I escaped.”

  “And you don’t miss it a bit?” I added, as we ordered our food and he gestured for another drink.

  “I miss the city. One does, if one has learned to love it. New York is a funny place. Living here is either mandatory or forbidden, it seems; there’s no middle way, though I’m learning to make do living in New Jersey as well as working there. And I miss Antonia,”
he said. “I see her from time to time, and I listen with a magnificently sympathetic and knowledgeable ear to her cries of distress, but it’s not the same as working together.”

  “Were you in modern literature too?” I asked. “I’m afraid these fields or areas or whatever you call them aren’t as distinct in my mind as they might be.”

  “They shouldn’t be that clear in anyone’s. I was an Americanist, actually, hired as one by the Clifton department. But I didn’t make any secret of the fact that I was gay, and then queer studies came along. . . .”

  “Queer studies?”

  “It sounds like an insult to your innocent ears? It isn’t; self-named in fact by the practitioners thereof. Anyway, the gay movement had taken on steam, there were some among the student body either already gay or wondering if they might be, or just interested, and of course when a perfectly normal-looking young man asked to write his senior thesis on homosexuality, the old boys flipped. At first they were going to forbid it on the grounds that it wasn’t really literature, and then they decided to turn it over to me and Antonia.”

  “Is Antonia gay too?”

  “No, baby, but she’s a feminist, and they figured they might as well put all the crazies together. She and I cooperated on directing senior honor theses, became comrades in arms, otherwise known as friends. There’re a lot of great people where I am now, but no Antonia. I’d love to get her to move near me. Get yourself a garden, I say, but the very thought of New Jersey sends chills up her spine. It’s something I’ve noticed in a lot of New Yorkers. A bit odd, but who am I to throw stones? Ah, here’s our food.”

  I asked for iced tea, not without having a fierce inner battle with myself over wine. I was happy listening to Rick, and I would have liked another drink. I couldn’t remember another case where I seemed so often to be wishing I wasn’t investigating and could just relax; I worried about it. But not half as much as I worried when Rick really got going on the English department at Clifton College, and the story of him and Antonia.