Turning the pages of the book, Rachel launches into a mini-lecture on the psychology of “The Minister’s Black Veil” and “Wakefield” and “The Maypole of Merry Mount.” After two or three minutes, she says, “Some readers find Hawthorne rather dull and gray, even Hawthorne himself, but I find him complex and profound.” She closes the book and looks up at Elaine. Elaine is slumped over, hands massaging each other, hair lank against her sallow cheeks. Revulsion tightens like a fist around Rachel’s groin. “I’m awfully sorry,” she says, “but I have to make an important call now.”
At the door, Elaine turns and smiles at Rachel. Her smile is sad, knowing, humiliated, as though she understands, even shares Rachel’s feeling. Then she’s gone.
A face surfaces from a distant memory. What was her name? RuthAnne? Yes. RuthAnne. She remembers that as RuthAnne passed in the junior high school corridor, the other girls sniggered and some held their noses in disgust and some whispered, “the Goon.” Rachel remembers RuthAnne’s raw, mottled face, her frizzy hair, and her long, hunched body, but most clearly she remembers her shamed, sickly smile. Like Elaine’s.
With a sigh, Rachel opens Winifred’s binder and flips through the pages. All of the sentences are declarative and none more than eight words. It’s hard to say focused. She decides to take Ingrid Larsdotter’s binder home for the evening, and tomorrow she’ll go back to the widows.
After dinner she sits in her big leather armchair and looks over Ingrid’s diary. Ingrid never married and lives with her two brothers and a sister-in-law on the Nebraska prairie. Rachel wishes she hadn’t included Ingrid, but she’s the only unmarried woman among her pioneers, and it would take time to find a different one. The pages drip bitterness and despair. Ingrid describes the smell of rancid sweat and manure and rotting wheat when her brothers “come tromping” to the table. She confides that she overheard her sister-in-law with the pouty lips refer to her as a “worm.”
As she reads that, Rachel finds herself thinking of Elaine and the distaste she feels for her. Never before has she felt this revulsion for a student. She has had favorite students, of course, ones she found attractive, but she has prided herself on being fair and open to all. She tells herself that her reaction to Elaine is a moral failing that must be corrected. She is a teacher and Elaine is her student who deserves attention and a sensitive response, not contempt.
***
Rachel is determined to overcome her revulsion. When she enters the classroom, she glances toward Elaine and greets her by name. She will not let herself move to the window, and when she throws out a question to the class, she looks to see if Elaine wants to answer it—she never does. The redheaded man always has his hand up. An attractive kid, good-looking, confident, smart and smart-alecky. Rachel likes him and likes teasing him. She always rolls her eyes and says, “You still yet and again?” And he grins, confident, loving the attention.
When the students gather at the lectern after the hour is over, Rachel makes a point of drawing Elaine into the group. The other students glance at Elaine, but no one speaks to her. They know. The worm. The goon.
***
It’s the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. Hennie is flying in in early evening, and they will spend the holidays at the country house of friends in Napa. Before picking him up at the airport Rachel wants to get a bit further outlining her essay on the power struggle between the pioneer women and their newly married sons. After her class, she buys a sandwich in the basement cafeteria and goes to her office. She spends the next hours pouring over Clondie’s diary, structuring her argument, identifying evidence, moving along.
And then there comes the rap on the door. She feels a clench of irritation, but she cheerily calls, “Come on in.”
It’s Elaine. Of course it’s Elaine—no other student would be hanging around the campus so late the afternoon before a holiday. They’d be off skiing, having fun.
Elaine sits down, and to start the conversation—the better to get it over with—Rachel says she’s sorry she assigned Melville’s Pierre: or, The Ambiguities, that it’s perhaps too dark and difficult for undergraduates. “Have you had any problem with it?” she asks Elaine.
“I’m not stupid,” Elaine says.
Rachel is taken aback. “Well, I wasn’t implying that. It’s just that sometimes students have problems with Melville, not necessarily because they can’t understand him but because they just don’t see what’s interesting. They don’t see the flickers of humor, for instance. I bet you didn’t think he was amusing, now did you?” She covers her acid tone by laughing lightly.
Elaine sucks in her breath with a little gasp and blinks her eyes rapidly. “No, I didn’t.” She begins to chew off the loose skin of her lips.
Rachel can’t stand her repulsive presence another moment. “Sorry, but I have to finish something now,” she says in a tense voice. Elaine picks up her backpack. At the door she turns and smiles that awful smile.
Once Elaine is gone, Rachel feels relief and guilt and a kind of sadness. With a sigh she goes back to the yellow tablet on which she was jotting notes. But the sun has dropped behind the clock tower and the office is growing dark. She will go home and take a little rest before picking up Hennie at the airport. Elaine’s visit, she thinks, has drained all her energy.
***
A light rain falls early Thanksgiving morning and the countryside is fresh and fragrant. In late afternoon, Rachel and Hennie take a walk down the lane between the barren grape vines. Hennie tells her he has identified a new gene in his bats and hopes to isolate it in other mammals. She tells him about her women, the filiarchy, poor Ingrid Larsdotter.
And then she tells him about Elaine, how unattractive she is, how she sits like a toad in the middle of the front row, and about her own revulsion. “And of course she’s hyper-sensitive. You know how some unattractive people can be all exposed nerves, finding a slight in every eye blink?” Rachel feels a pang of remorse. “Well, but she just wants a mentor or something.” She shrugs. “A lot of students are looking for mentors. I used to hang around my professors when I was at Smith.” She laughs ruefully. “I was a real pest.”
“I wish you hung around me more,” says Hennie, pulling her to him and kissing her on the cheek. “The love of my life.” They both laugh. Hennie’s work is the love of his life, as her work is hers. Both had failed at marriage. In graduate school, she had found Mick—her first lover and as lonely as she had been—but while she had worked so hard to finish her degree and then as an assistant professor and Mick sold software, they had grown apart until finally they had hated each other. She had changed, he said, and she had said, Thank God for that. After the divorce, Mick had married and soon had two sons. She was glad: nothing to regret. She feels lucky to have worked it out with Hennie so that both are content.
***
It’s December and only one week remains in the term. Rachel reminds the students that their papers are due at the last class and that the final will be the following Thursday. “Having done the reading could help. Also having stayed awake in class.” And of course the students laugh. “If you have any questions, drop by my office.”
All afternoon they drop by, a few to discuss the exam, a few to get an extension on their essay, a few still looking for an essay topic. The redheaded man comes in. He has thirty major ideas for a fifteen-page paper. For the next ten minutes they narrow his project, teasing each other, laughing.
When he leaves, it’s Elaine’s turn.
“If you want an extension,” Rachel says, “you can have until the day of the final without a penalty.”
Elaine looks insulted. “I don’t need an extension.”
“Good. So what can I do for you?” Rachel impatiently drums her fingers against her knee under the desk. And then get out, she thinks.
“I wanted to know if it’s all right to write my paper on your idea,”
“Treatment is everything. What idea?”
“Melville’s humor. You said you thought he
was humorous,” Elaine says.
“Did I say that?” Rachel doesn’t remember saying anything about Melville to Elaine. “Well, I certainly didn’t mean humorous like, say, Mark Twain. But Melville’s a good choice.” When Elaine doesn’t respond, Rachel begins to talk about her fondness for Melville, his depth, his contrariness, and, okay, his humor. Then she stands up. “Here let me show you this great picture of him.”
“Why don’t you just tell me to leave?” Elaine grabs her backpack and heads for the door.
“Now just a minute,” Rachel begins, but she sees that terrible smile, and then Elaine is gone.
RuthAnne. That smile. Rachel thinks of the last time she had spoken to RuthAnne. RuthAnne had caught up with her after school and clutched her arm and said, “I’ve got cigarettes. Come home with me and we can smoke. It was fun last week, wasn’t it?”
Rachel had seen the other girls watching, judging, smirking, and she had felt herself flushing and almost weeping. “I won’t go home with you, I hate you,” she had said and had run off.
After that Rachel had spent her afternoons studying in the musty library, hearing the shouts and squeals from the grassy field where the students gathered. Then evenings of algebra and geography and weekends reading Austen, imagining that she was Elizabeth Bennet.
She never spoke to RuthAnne again.
Guilt, Rachel thinks. Somehow Elaine has dug up the whole RuthAnne thing. Not that Elaine looks anything like RuthAnne. Small and rather delicate, not raw-boned like RuthAnne. A smudgy, darkish complexion, not blotchy red. And she’s smart, which no one ever accused RuthAnne of being. Strange that a guilt can last half a century and then transfer to someone else. She wishes she had never met Elaine.
***
Elaine does very well on the exam, answers all the factual questions correctly, and shows real insight and understanding on the essay questions—the best exam in the class. Her paper on Melville’s humor, though overloaded with the opinions of critics, is thoughtful and carefully written and even shows smidgens of buried humor, like Melville’s. Rachel is glad to give Elaine an A+ for the course. She knows Elaine will be thrilled, as she herself had been when she received an A+. All’s well that ends well. Rachel has never been happier to see the end of the term, the last of a student.
***
Christmas comes and with it Hennie. He says his lab is doing something spectacular and he can only stay three days. One evening after Hennie leaves, she goes to the movies with her bachelor friend Guy who is a Medievalist, on another has dinner with another Americanist and her new husband, briefly attends a New Year’s Eve party at a neighbor’s, and spends the rest of the time on her pioneer women.
When she finishes outlining the article on the widows and their sons, she sets it aside to let it mellow and turns to her other women. Nina Casper lives alone in the backwoods of the Appalachian Mountains in North Carolina. Leah Stein is married to a peddler gone from home weeks at a time. Lizzie Comstock’s husband is a circuit preacher. Rachel is very happy working. She likes the company of these brave women.
***
On the third day of the new term, as Rachel sits at her desk looking through Leah’s diary, she hears a tap on the door and calls Come in, and there’s Elaine, drenched from the sudden rain. Rachel had not thought about Elaine once during the holidays, but now it all storms back: the tedious encounters, her revulsion, RuthAnne.
Rachel motions Elaine to the chair by the desk. “Come to complain about getting an A+?” she asks with a laugh.
“I wanted to ask your advice,” Elaine says, “on how to become a professor.” She looks down at her hands, then up again, a shy smile playing on her lips. “I want to know how I can get from where I sit to where you sit.”
Sit where she sits? Other students have asked similar questions, seeking advice on what courses to take, where to apply for graduate work. Rachel has sometimes encouraged them, sometimes not. She will not encourage Elaine. Elaine just doesn’t have what it takes.
Rachel puts on a thoughtful expression and says, “Well, your paper showed you could do the research, and you did very well on the exam. But I’m not sure I’d recommend it as a profession. It’s not the cushy job it may seem—it’s hard work. There were years when I thought about nothing but work morning, noon, and night.”
Elaine says, “I’m happiest when I’m studying and working.”
“Well, so was I, but of course it’s not just the work.” It’s impossible to picture Elaine holding office hours or lecturing to a class of bright, critical students. They’d be trampling each other to get out the door. “It takes other things.”
Elaine leans forward. “But can’t I learn those other things?”
Never, Rachel thinks. Before she can figure out how to discourage Elaine without being cruel, there’s a tapping on the door and the department chair sticks his head into the room. He smiles apologetically and says, “Sorry. Didn’t mean to interrupt.” He’s carrying his briefcase and umbrella, ready to go home, a plump, easy-going, good-natured man. Rachel is always happy to see him, never more than now.
“Come on in,” she says. “We’re finished.”
Elaine stands up. At the door she smiles the terrible complicit smile, as though she and Rachel had forged a bond.
The department chair merely wants to ask Rachel to serve on the graduate studies committee. How could she refuse him when he has saved her from such an unpleasant moment and perhaps from saying or doing something she would regret. For a few minutes they chat about the department and the university and then the chair leaves.
Rachel feels unsettled and restless, and she calls Guy, and asks him if he’s ever had an Elaine Sherrill in his class, and Guy laughs and says he only remembers the boys. “She giving you grief?”
Rachel’s feelings of revulsion and guilt are too personal, too unprofessional, to share even with Guy. “She wrote a really good paper in my class last quarter, and I just wondered if she was one of our Honors students.” Because that’s so weak, she quickly adds, “Actually, I was calling to see if you’re too busy with the boys to go to the movies. I need a break.”
They arrange to go to the new Spanish film.
When Rachel hears the rain beating on the roof, she goes to the window and braces her hands on the ledge and presses her forehead against the cold pane. It had rained almost continuously the winter she and her parents had moved to California. Every day she had sloshed through the puddles and arrived at the junior high school drenched, her sneakers oozing water, her hair plastered to her cheeks, her moist wool clothes smelling like wet dog. She had felt utterly alone. And then along came RuthAnne to befriend her. The other girls—giggling, chirping, whispering to each other—looked at them thinking, Two of a kind, two goons. Rachel had not been able to bear that. She remembers as though she had just read it the plaintive, begging note RuthAnne had written: Please be my friend again. She shakes her head at the irony. It’s too many years too late to make amends.
***
It is still raining the next day. Rain stands ankle-deep in declivities on the pathways and leaves greasy tracks down the office windows. After a dull lecture in which Rachel fails to elicit from the students even a pretended interest in Emerson, she picks her way through the rain, buys her sandwich and milk, and goes back to her office.
She decides to work on Clondie and flips through Clondie’s binder, looking for a good quotation to get her going. She reads once more about Clondie’s silent son, Lillard, and her silly daughter-in-law who pinches color into her cheeks when the preacher calls. Clondie reports this and everything else in a dull and plaintive tone. Clondie is like Elaine, repressed, meager, miserable. Another boring choice she had made, like Ingrid.
Rachel goes to the bookshelf and runs her fingers over the backs of the binders, choosing a different one. But all the women remind her of Elaine. Nina’s smothered fury. Leah’s desperate loneliness. Winifred’s dullness. Even Mary’s useless intelligence. Elaine has infected the p
roject. She has contaminated the pioneer women.
Rachel wants to tell Hennie how discouraged she is, but when she calls Tucson, he is in neither his office nor his apartment. Where could he be? Has he found someone else, as Mick had? Hennie is always commenting on young women, this one breasty, that one with great legs, another with a gorgeous youthful face. Rachel always laughs, taking it as a joke. But she knows she’s not attractive that way, has never been. It was only a matter of time when he would move on. Anyway, she thinks, he is in love with his work, and she was never more than a convenience for him. He has probably found a more attractive convenience.
The tower clock bongs six times, and Rachel listens to the empty building around her. She thinks of her colleagues snug in their homes, sipping martinis in front of a roaring fire, the department head with his pretty wife perched on the arm of his chair, ruffling his few remaining strands of hair, the Americanist and her husband deep in intimate talk. Even her friend Guy is somewhere with someone.
She looks up at the diaries and shakes her head. The project is dead. The diaries are too dull, too dreary. She can’t imagine why she ever found the miserable women appealing. What she needs is a new project.
Hawthorne? Emerson? Stowe? James? Yes, Henry James. She’s had some interesting ideas about various women in his life, Minnie and Constance and Alice and Henry’s mother. Attractive, clever women, not like the pioneers. They would make an exciting book.
She decides to go home, to have a glass of wine and spend the evening steeping herself in The Portrait of a Lady. Tomorrow she’ll start on the background reading and thinking. Maybe that will break her awful gloom.
She pulls on her raincoat and opens the door, and there’s Elaine sitting on the corridor bench where students wait their turn. “Hello,” Elaine says, standing. Raincoat dripping water, stringy hair lank along her cheeks, moist hands gripping the backpack.
Rachel feels the kick of revulsion. “Kind of late for office hours,” she says in a deliberately hostile voice.
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