by Ann Birch
“What exactly do you mean by ‘sleazy’?” Ed asks, his lips in a tight line.
“A young girl seduces her stepfather. ‘Be able to summarize your novel in fifty words,’ I’ve heard writers say. Well, I’ve done it in six.”
“Ovid, isn’t it?” Ed says. “I remember something about it from those Trinity courses in Lit. There’s a lot of really vile stuff on the Internet these days, but it’s all about men violating women.” He gives a laugh that sounds bitter. “So I guess this ‘adaptation,’ as you call it, gives bright and fresh insights.”
“So now I know why you had those magazines hidden under your rug,” Charlie says. “And why you told me they were for research. In a way, it’s a bit of a relief to hear this. I thought you were missing Dad … you know what I mean? I thought we were going to have to keep an eye on you. You know, first the magazines, then the male strippers down at the Fantasy Club on Dundas.” His face is very red, but Roberta sees that he’s trying to make a joke of it, and she loves him for his effort.
Ed shakes his head. “You think it’s better that Ma was using the sleaze to furnish ideas for this filthy novel she’s telling us about? You’d really prefer that to thinking that she was having it off by reading the stuff?” He turns to Roberta. “And now, having written this … this thing … have you even thought about us? About how the bespoke suits at my law firm will react if they hear about it? I could come in for a lot of flak, maybe even lose my job.”
“Ed, you’re being irrational. No one at your firm need know about this book. I’ve written it under a pseudonym, so I hope to keep the whole thing secret. I’m sorry, it was a crazy thing I did. But I guess my defence must be that I’ve been able to put a sizeable amount towards those debts your father piled up and left us to deal with.”
“Yeah,” Ed says. “Thirty pieces of silver for betrayal of—”
“Let it go, bro,” Charlie says. “But remember the iceberg stuff you were talking about at your launch, Mom? Didn’t you say that you’ve got to keep your eye on the deep water? Seems to me you may be sailing right into the path of disaster.”
“Yeah,” Ed says, taking a deep breath. “Straight into the iceberg.”
They are all silent. Roberta bites her bottom lip. What can she say? Ed is right: The iceberg looms in her path.
“You know, Ma,” Ed says. “You’ve been quick to condemn Dad for this mess of debt. Hasn’t it occurred to you that you’ve done the exact same thing?”
“The exact same thing?”
“Yeah, you’ve gambled, just the way he did. At the moment, you seem to be winning. But the stakes are high. And I’ll be surprised if you come out of all this a winner.”
God yes, Ed is right. I’ve broken out of my safe and comfortable world and thrown everything away on a gamble. I always blamed James for thrill-seeking, for putting himself or the children at risk. And now I’ve done the same thing. I, Trinity’s most respected scholar — at least that’s what the Provost calls me — have possibly thrown my reputation away; that is, if the truth leaks out. And there’s my own private shame to deal with; the guilt about that incest theme will haunt me forever.
“But at least I know now why you wouldn’t take my cheque. So I guess I can’t be mad at you about that any more. And if all this is another Titanic, you’ve got one good defence.” Ed breaks off, gives a tug at his neck as if he were straightening his tabs and says in an imitation of one of his law firm’s senior partners: “Your Honour, my client was simply updating an old story.”
“Joke?” Charlie asks.
Ed nods, but no one laughs.
Roberta gets up from the table. “I’ll still make the goddamn apple cheese crisp.” Charlie rises, too, and puts his arms around her. Ed waits a few seconds, then does the same. Three comforting hugs in as many days. Maybe she’ll get through it all.
The phone rings. “If it’s for me,” Roberta says, “just take the message. I don’t feel up to talking to anyone just now.”
Charlie answers. She sees him making a note on the telephone pad. “It’s Provost Witherspoon,” he says when he hangs up. “He knows you’re on leave of absence and all that, but the Ethics Committee is having a major meeting tomorrow night and since you’re Chair, he’d like you to be there.”
“I’ll phone him in the morning.”
“What’s this Ethics Committee all about anyway?” Ed asks.
“A student at another college has filed a grievance against one of the university’s most venerable senior professors, accusing him of improper sexual advances towards her. She says he offered her the needed marks for an Oxford scholarship in return for sex. So Trinity is drawing up guidelines for professional behaviour.”
“Covering its ass, that’s what,” Charlie says as he loads the dishwasher.
“What are you going to do, Ma?” Ed says. “I think, given what you’ve just dumped on us, you’d better stay home, send an email, and say you’re resigning. You couldn’t possibly serve on an Ethics Committee now. I mean, come on.”
“I have to,” Roberta says. “Don’t you see? I’ve got to do what I normally do. Otherwise, people at Trin are going to wonder why I’m changing patterns. They’ll think I’ve got something against these guidelines. And then when the book comes out, they might recognize the source of the plot and characters, and they might put two and two together….”
“Covering your ass, that’s what you’re doing,” Charlie says.
“Yeah,” Ed agrees. “A truly ethical stance.”
“Okay, boys, say what you want. I deserve your cynicism.” She takes a deep breath. “I just hoped your hug a few minutes ago showed that you’d forgiven me. But I guess it’s not going to be that easy.”
“You’re serving on that bloody committee, Ma. It’s hypocrisy on top of everything else. But I’m not going to say one more word about this shit.” Ed picks up the newspaper on the breakfast-room ledge and starts reading. The only sounds Roberta hears now are the thump of the dishwasher door and the rattle of the pages of the paper.
17.
THE ETHICS COMMITTEE MEETS in the Provost’s Lodge, the elegant rooms at the end of the main corridor in Trinity Colloege. When Roberta arrives, the other four members of the committee are seated in what she thinks of as “the drawing room,” and they are drinking Provost Witherspoon’s excellent sherry that he has served up in small crystal glasses. It is such a refined world the Provost inhabits, courtesy of Trinity’s benefactors: book-lined mahogany shelves, Persian rugs everywhere, and the Group of Seven’s finest oil paintings on whatever wall she turns to. She settles into a high-backed armchair and catches a whiff of lemon oil from the small shiny table beside her.
The only discordant note at the moment seems to come from Joan Wishart, Trinity’s Chaucer scholar, who is holding forth on her favourite topic: the declining standards of today’s students. She is at least fifty-five but prides herself on dressing à la mode, as she calls it. This evening, she is in tight jeans with a purple sweater that shows off her brown-spotted cleavage.
“It’s the stuff they read online, the porno sites they’re viewing, the violent video games,” she’s saying. “Pure evil. But I’ll say this for myself, I try to elevate the tone in my classes.”
“Isn’t that a bit difficult, Joan dear, given the nature of some of those lines from The Canterbury Tales?” This question comes from Doug Dunsmore, a shaggy-haired man whose tenacious nature always reminds Roberta of a dog with a trapped animal in its mouth. He was one of James’s friends. They shared the Victorian Lit courses between them with Doug concentrating on the “lesser Victorians.”
“You’re a fine one to make sniping comments. Why Lewis Carroll, paedophile extraordinaire, is on any university course anywhere is beyond me.” As Joan says this, she holds out her sherry glass in her tiny beringed hand, and the Provost obliges with a second (perhaps third?) glass.
“How any p
rofessor anywhere could be so misinformed about Lewis Carroll is beyond me.” Doug’s prominent jaw tightens.
“Why don’t we get started on tonight’s topic?” Roberta asks, taking a glass of sherry and getting out her notebook. “We have to finalize the wording of these guidelines for resolving student grievances.”
Joan wades right in. “We must take the stand that professors are always culpable in any sexual relationship with their students. The young person is never to blame.”
“Is it that simple?” Geoff Teasdale asks. Geoff is a young lecturer in Comparative Religion. His slender figure with its nipped-in waist always reminds Roberta of the famous statue of the kouros in thethe Metropolitan Museum of Art.
“We can hardly ignore the Morris Shadwell case,” Geoff continues.
The Provost speaks up. He is not at all like his name, being a bluff, hearty man with plump cheeks. “Ah yes, remind me. What was Shadwell’s euphemism for paedophilia?”
Roberta fills him in. “‘Intergenerational sex.’ Not always a bad thing, according to him. I remember his comment that it can sometimes involve ‘healthy self-awareness and delightful pleasure.’ Those phrases got him into a lot of trouble.”
“Got him fired from his teaching position, as I recall,” Doug says. “So perhaps we should nail down a position that makes clear what we expect from our teaching staff here at Trinity. That way we can fend off trouble. None of us is likely to initiate ‘intergenerational sex’ if the rule book sets out our culpability in no uncertain terms.”
“Cover our asses, you mean,” Roberta says. The words have popped out before she can elevate her diction.
Doug laughs. Joan looks appalled. She fingers the little squares of shiny pink glass that seem to be glued to her neck. “I’m sure you’re with me, Roberta, but really...”
“Okay, okay, sorry. But that’s what we’re doing. And now, if we can all agree on the need for … clothing our nether regions, we can go ahead and work on the phrasing of the guidelines.”
“Not so fast, please,” Geoff Teasdale says. “Forget Morris Shadwell for just a minute. After all, some people might say that professors from his college are not quite up to University of Toronto standards. But how about one of our own? Didn’t Robertson Davies defend Humbert Humbert? Didn’t he point out that Lolita was all about, quote, ‘the exploitation of a weak man by a corrupt child?’”
“Oh goodness me,” the Provost says, mopping his forehead. “Surely not. It’s been a while since I read it, but I didn’t take that … that message.“ He gulps his glass of sherry.
Roberta never believed in the cliché, heart in my mouth, until this moment. Oh my God, corrupt child and weak adult, is that what my novel is really about? While her thoughts are tumbling forth, she becomes aware that the Provost is speaking to her. “Sorry, you were saying?”
“I’m asking what your view of Lolita is.”
“Well, I don’t agree with Robertson Davies, as Geoff seems to,” Roberta replies. “I’m with Lionel Trilling who said, I think, in one of his reviews or essays that Nabokov intended to show Humbert Humbert as an eloquent but self-deceived narrator who tries to con readers into condoning the violation of a child.”
And what have I done? Roberta thinks with anguish. Like Ovid, I’ve suggested the adult is blameless. Why did I not make it clear that Mira’s stepfather should be held responsible?
Joan Wishart looks at her watch. “So it seems, with the exception of Geoff perhaps, that we’re in agreement about the responsibility of adults to young people. So, let’s get on with the drafting of our guidelines.”
More wrangling, but eventually they reach some sort of consensus. Roberta records the wording: “It is the moral responsibility of the professor to keep the teacher-student contract inviolate, whatever his or her sexual impulses might be.”
“We must keep in mind at all times that the young person is never to blame.” Joan’s voice is shrill as she says this. The sherry is probably taking effect. “Put that in as well, Roberta.”
“Joan dear,” Doug Dunsmore says, “now you sound a bit as if you’re Saint Paul laying down the law to the Corinthians.”
“Let’s just leave it as is,” Roberta says. Though what that sanctimonious twit Joan will say if she ever reads Mira, I don’t really want to think about.
“Not so fast. Back to Morris Shadwell, please,” Geoff says, just as Joan has smacked her pen into her purse and is about to struggle to standing position from out of the Provost’s comfortable sofa. “We haven’t covered anything on classroom discussions about ‘intergenerational sex.’ Shadwell, as I understand it, got into trouble when he broached the subject in his class in response to a question about freedom of speech for journalists. That’s what all the flak in the papers was about, not that I read much of it at the time.”
“Think yourself too grand for the local media, is that it?” Joan says.
“Good thought, Geoff,” Doug Dunsmore says, ignoring her. “So are we about to insert a clause in this so-called ethical guideline that limits our freedom of speech in the classroom?”
“What do you think, Joan? Should we cover our ass?” Geoff asks.
“Please,” the Provost says, “let’s try to keep this…”
Roberta speaks up. “There are tales from Ovid’s Metamorphoses on my course curriculum. I mean the real tales, not those sanitized ones served up to nineteenth-century ‘ladies,’ and I refuse to consent to any written guideline that shuts down my right and my students’ right to speak freely about them. The story of Myrrha, for example, whether it’s about ‘intergenerational sex’ or paedophilia or whatever you—”
“That little slut,” Joan says. “Pardon my language.” She shakes her head as if she cannot believe that Ovid could conceive of such a character. One of her over-permed tendrils bounces out of its gelled niche.
My God, Roberta thinks, what possessed me to mention Myrrha? Now I am heading straight for the iceberg.
“But I thought you said earlier that the young person is never to blame.” Doug’s canine jaw parts in a grin that says, “Gotcha.”
“Okay, so I was talking about real life, not literature. I’m not contradicting myself. You know, Roberta, Doug implied earlier that Chaucer was a wee bit naughty, but he’s a turtledove compared with Ovid. I’m sure that at times you must have real reservations about teaching that kind of sick stuff.”
It is nine-thirty now, and no one really wants to sit any longer. So they shelve the question of guidelines for class discussion for another meeting, another night.
18.
THE CHRISTMAS SEASON CONTINUES with its usual overkill from all sides. To have to listen to carols in every aisle of the grocery store, spend too much money on presents and then hours wrapping them, get knocked on the head with recipes for food and drink, confront the Christmas card list — well, it is all just too much. But at least it keeps Roberta from dwelling on the arrival of April with the appearance of Mira on every book rack in the city, probably even the pharmacies, if she can judge by the pulp fiction she sees every time she purchases her vitamin supplement.
Better to concentrate on the here and now. She puts a pile of wrapped presents under the tree, which Charlie has covered with decorated gingerbread men. The smell of the spruce boughs floods the living room.
In her memory, there is a long-ago room with a spruce tree in the corner and she is there, sitting on Daddy’s knee, and he is reading her … what?
And close on the heels of that memory is another one of another room, a bedroom filled with shadows, extreme pain in her right side, and one of the shadows is Daddy hovering at the foot of her bed. And she remembers feeling suddenly better, comforted.
Then came the ride in the back seat of the Oldsmobile down a long dark highway to what she now knows was Toronto. Nothing remains in her memory of the Hospital for Sick Children except the tubes in her ank
le and that Daddy was there to hold her hand whenever the nurses changed them. She remembers the ugly orthopaedic oxfords she wore afterwards — she had to learn to walk again — and Daddy told her it would only be for a while and that he would buy her any shoes she wanted from Paterson’s Dry Goods in Summerton.
And now, she was back to the room with the spruce tree, and it was Christmas, and she was just home from the hospital, sitting on the carpet surrounded by the smell of evergreen and a pile of teddy bears, puzzles, a miniature dollhouse, a doll’s baby carriage, and a hundred other gifts. They were all in a heap under the Christmas tree, and it had taken her an hour to unwrap them.
“Everyone has sent you something, Roberta, to say ‘glad you’re well again,’” Mother said to her. “Now just be sure you keep the cards and put them with your gifts. We’ll have to get busy with thank-you notes soon.”
She started to cry. It was all too much. She imagined printing “R-O-B-E-R-T-A” on the bottom of a hundred sheets of notepaper. It would take a month at least.
And then Daddy crossed the room, picked her up, and carried her to his comfortable chair near the oak bookcase. He sat down, placed her on his lap, and handed her a small red tissue paper package. “Let’s see what I bought for you, dear,” he said. There were no bows to untie, no sticky tape to pry off. Just one rip and there it was: Goldilocks and the Three Bears, her very favourite book.
“Read it, Daddy,” she said, and he obliged, making his voice deep for Father Bear, soft for Mother Bear, and squeaky for Baby Bear.
She laughed and laughed, safe in the wrap of his warm arms, as he read it over and over and over.
The doorbell rings. It is Mrs. Schubert. She is wearing a winter coat, but there is an inch or two of pink flannel nightgown showing, and her blue-veined legs seem bare beneath her heavy boots. Roberta pulls her into the warm vestibule.
“Sorry to bother you, Roberta. I have a big favour to ask, and I find it better to say it face to face than over the phone. Because then I can see your real reaction. So I just came right over though I know it’s very early to be making a call.”
