by Ann Birch
Biff, Charlie’s girlfriend, has purple hair and several holes in her earlobes for the planting of an assortment of small copper rings. Ed’s friend Ashley is a pale spectre, long and languid, in a magenta dress with a straggly hem. Roberta has met Biff before — she plays the piano in a downtown restaurant — but Ashley is new on the scene.
“Wooo,” Biff says, as Polonius farts and greets her with the thrust of his nose into her crotch. “I’m sure glad you gave me that cologne, Charlie.” Her lavender scent covers most of the stench, and for this, Roberta is grateful. What’s more, Biff has scarcely seated herself before she plunges right into the jazz discussion. “You heard Tommy Dorsey and Benny Goodman at the Palais Royale, Neville? Cool!” There is not a particle of irony in her voice. “And what do you think of Glenn Miller?”
“I try not to,” Neville says, each vowel and consonant articulated.
“I’m with you. That guy sucks, big time.”
Carl’s dad has put down The New Yorker, and he takes a second glass of prosecco. Ashley, meanwhile, is assessing the furniture. She works in an antique store, as Ed told her a week ago.
“That’s a lovely secretary,” she says. “What’s its provenance?”
Ed’s allergies have been triggered by Biff’s perfume. He sneezes and gropes for a tissue in his pocket. “If you mean who did it belong to, it was my great-grandfather’s.”
“What a beautiful pediment! Jacques and Hay, I’m sure. Probably carved by the master, Charles Rogers.” Her pale face flushes with excitement. “Okay if I pull out this drawer?” she asks Roberta.
Not really waiting for Roberta’s “sure,” she opens it, uncovering a pile of old papers that spill onto the rug.
“Best not to snoop, dear.” Roberta’s mother speaks for the first time. “Remember Bluebeard’s wife?”
Oh whatever gods there be, deliver me from family Christmases. But just as she is thinking this, Charlie creates a diversion by bringing in the turkey, burnished gold, on the Limoges platter that James purchased in an antique store in Summerton on one of their visits to her mother after Daddy’s death. She remembers James’s smile as he ran his fingers over the tiny pink roses and gilt edge. But that image erodes into the vision of him hunched over the keyboard of his computer, tapping away the family finances.
They all sit down at the dining-room table, and Ed goes into the kitchen and emerges with silver entrée dishes of buttery squash and whipped potatoes.
“Yum,” Carl says.
Now comes the moment that Roberta has not planned for. Who is to carve? There’s that empty space where James once presided. A moment of silence, and then Ed moves to the head of the table. “Time for ‘Agimus tibi,’ Ma,” he says gently, positioning himself in front of the turkey and picking up the carving set.
She starts bravely. “Agimus tibi gratias, Deus omnipotens…” and then she can get no further. Her tears flow, and everyone is witness. Not a chance of anyone pretending not to notice.
“Christmases can be difficult, Dr. Greaves,” Carl’s father says. “We understand, don’t we, Carl?”
“My wife Claire died recently,” Carl explains to the guests. He takes a handkerchief from his suit pocket and wipes his nose. “I’m having a hard time not to cry, too.”
Charlie fills everyone’s glasses with Pinot Grigio, and Ed shifts the focus by asking, “Dark meat or white? Dressing?”
Unlike Carl, however, Roberta is not at this moment mourning a lost spouse. It’s Daddy she’s thinking of. Of her first trip home from Trinity College at Thanksgiving time, and how she’d tried out the Latin grace she’d learned.
Her father had just risen to carve the turkey. Knife and fork in hand, he had listened to her quavering voice as she stumbled over some of the words, not sure she was getting them right. Then he had smiled at her and said, “My darling daughter, what a lovely blessing.”
By the time Ed has finished carving, she’s got herself in hand. The scent of the turkey and its sage-and-onion stuffing has overcome the dog’s farts. Neville picks up his knife, and says, “‘Is this a dagger that I see before me?’” What a pain in the ass, to use Charlie’s term. How could her mother possibly find him attractive? But then, Roberta realizes he’s probably trying to get a laugh. Well, forgive him, she tells herself. He is doing his bit.
She realizes that Carl’s dad is speaking to her. “My son tells me you’re an authority on Ovid, Dr. Greaves?”
“Well, I’ve read the original text of Metamorphoses and every translation or adaptation right up to Ted Hughes’s, so I guess I know Ovid well, though I’m more of an ‘authority’ on Euripida’s Cretan manuscripts.”
Neville looks positively pouty at being upstaged. He may know Shakespeare, but he hasn’t a thing to say about Ovid. And this seems to please Carl’s dad who’s in full flight now. Neville couldn’t get a word in if he tried.
“I hate ‘Pygmalion,’” Mr. Talbot says. “Though I suppose if the story gets that much reaction from me, it must be good in its way. But the idea of that jerk not being able to love anyone but the perfect woman — and one of his own construct too — is revolting.”
“Revolting hardly covers it,” Biff says. “Some of my friends, twenty years old, are getting Botox injections. Maybe they don’t know about Pygmalion — Pig Male is my own private name for him — but they sure get the male hype about the perfect woman.”
“I’ll always think of my son as the antithesis of Pygmalion.” Mr. Talbot’s voice rises. “He loved a real woman and he kept that love right to the end of her life through all the chemo treatments and the disfigurations and the hysterectomy and the mastectomy.”
“Dad, Roberta’s heard all this before.” Carl looks at the group around the table. “I’m no Pygmalion, but I’m not the Archangel Carl either. So let’s change the subject.”
“Before we do,” Roberta’s mother says, “I’d just like to point out that some women are every bit as bad as Pygmalion. They construct a perfect male in their minds, and they pour out their love on this figment of their imaginations, this … construct … as you would call it, Mr. Talbot. I loved my late husband, but I was always aware that he had his faults.” Her glance sweeps over to Roberta who tries to figure out why this comment seems directed at her. Is her mother holding some sort of grudge against her?
“You were very young when your father died?” Neville asks her.
“Eighteen. Just finished my first year at Trinity. It was an awful shock.”
“Perhaps better, really. I know, I know, it sounds callous, but the early death of a parent enables one to keep one’s illusions. My own mother died when she was ninety-five, and by that time, I was glad to see her go. She was an ongoing drain on my resources: physical, financial, and emotional. After her death, I felt free. I started having a life of my own. And I met Sylvia.”
Neville smiles at Roberta’s mother. She smiles back at him and reaches for his hand, apparently oblivious to the gravy in his beard.
“Remind yourselves to give me an overdose before I get to ninety-five,” Roberta says to her sons.
There is a long silence that Ed breaks. “Carrot pudding next,” he says. “With lots of rum sauce and whipped cream. Maybe by the time Charlie and I put it all together, we can get onto a more festive topic.” He pushes his chair back with a thud.
Later, after everyone has finally left, and Ed and Charlie have gone out with the girls, Roberta tidies up. The day could have been worse. She smiles to herself, thinking of Carl’s comment to Neville about his cannibalism of the Cornish hen.
As she is straightening the coats in the vestibule closet, she notices Carl’s gloves on the closet shelf. He’d been so busy finding his father’s scarf and helping him on with his galoshes that he’d forgotten them. They are brown sheepskin, well-worn, but hand-stitched and beautifully soft. She picks them up, puts her hands inside. They are so warm.
<
br /> 21.
PROVOST WITHERSPOON’S BULKY Gore-Tex-clad figure blocks the front door of the Lodge. Roberta sees him as she turns off Philosopher’s Walk onto the sidewalk that fronts Trinity College. It’s a frosty day, but sweat has misted his spectacles and drips from his double chin.
Just back from his jog, she surmises. Must be eight-thirty. She checks her watch. Right on: She will have time for coffee and a quick review of the material she is discussing with her class later in the morning.
“Professor Greaves!” The Provost jogs in place in front of her. “My dear, welcome back to teaching. I know you’ve kept up with your marking while you’ve been on leave, and for that we’re grateful. But your students will be glad to see you in the classroom again.” He wipes his chin with what looks like one of the napkins from High Table in Strachan Hall. “Their youthful enthusiasm reflects what we all feel for your exceptional accomplishments, my dear. Really — you’ve brought distinction to the college.”
“Thank you.”
“So glad I met you this morning.” He waves the napkin and trots to the door of the Lodge.
Roberta grabs her mail from the Porter’s Lodge and moves up the staircase past Seeley Hall to her office. As she takes off her jacket, she stands at the mullioned window, relaxing for a moment in the January sunshine flooding in from the quadrangle. She remembers the Provost’s compliments and smiles. A student looks up from the sidewalk and waves. For a moment, all seems right in her world.
Her phone rings.
“Got a message from George Korda,” her agent says. “Things are hopping. He’s hoping to have the advance readers’ copies ready early February to send to four of the top writers of erotica.”
“Who are…? Not that I really want to know.”
“Jade Morningstar, Ishtar, Plaisir Foncé, and…” Roberta can hear the rustle of paper. “Eronomous.”
“Hmm. Eromenos, maybe?”
More rustling of paper. “Yeah, you’re right. Mean something?”
“Eromenos is the Greek name for a young male paramour.”
“Hey, same as Mira except for gender. Well, there you go. Let’s hope we get good blurbs. Why do I get the impression that Plaisir Foncé will love it?”
“Oh Marianne, stop it, please. I can only think that all these writers are like me, all ashamed of what they’re doing.”
“Because they’re using these fake names, right? Well, suck it up, Roberta. Every reader in the Universe of Erotica knows these people. If they give us good blurbs for the back cover, who cares? It’s all about making a pile, isn’t it? And think about it, this Eromenos guy slash gal might even be the alias of a classics professor like yours truly.”
Marianne is laughing as she hangs up.
On her Trinity desk, Roberta sees a copy of The Cretan Manuscripts. She picks it up and looks at the back cover. Four wonderful blurbs there, all from people she respects, including the host of a popular BBC program on ancient myth. And now she is stuck with Eromenos et al.
No time to dwell on it though. At the moment, she’s got to get ready for her return to the classroom. Her lesson plan is in place. She just needs to check out the facts about the parentage of a sea nymph in one of the stories she will be discussing with her students. She pulls down a volume from the book-lined walls of her office. Whoa. Just as she feared. Daughter of Doris and her brother, Nereus. You cannot get away from incest in ancient literature. I just can’t handle it today, she thinks. Her students have all read their translations of Ovid. So they will know the Pygmalion story. She runs through alternative lesson plans. Maybe I can segue into Euripida’s take on the Pygmalion myth, or something.
Meantime, she remembers she has made a nine o’clock appointment with a student named Bryan Schmidt. She takes his essay from the middle drawer of her desk where she has stashed it ready for the interview, along with a book she is going to push under his nose. Right on time, there is a knock at the door and Bryan comes in. He walks with a bit of a swagger.
“So, there’s a problem?” he asks. “Something about my essay, you said?”
“Plagiarism. From the Latin plagiarius.”
He stares at her. “So?”
“It means ‘kidnapper.’” She sets the essay entitled, “Sexual Segregation in Classical Athens” before him. She reads aloud a sentence from page four: “‘The Athenian lady’s greatest task was to manage the heterosexual gang of slaves which swarmed in every wealthy mansion.’” She pauses.
“So?” But his face has turned scarlet.
“This sentence is one you’ve kidnapped almost verbatim from William Stearns Davis’s book, A Day in Old Athens.” Roberta points to the book that sits next to his red-marked essay. She flips it open, turns to Chapter Seven, and points to the plagiarized passage. “Of course, Davis knows it’s ‘heterogeneous’ not ‘heterosexual.’ But I can’t find a footnote, a parenthetical reference, or a bibliographic entry anywhere that acknowledges your source.”
“So?” And then he gives a huge sigh. “What are you going to do?”
“Well, I have two choices. I could report this to the powers that be and you could lose your year and end up with a transcript with ‘Academic Dishonesty’ stamped on it.” She pauses. “Or I could issue a warning and hope you’ll never do such a stupid thing again. After all, I did spend a good part of our first class in September warning against cheating.”
Bryan’s forehead breaks out in a sweat. “Man, oh man.”
“So go forth now, and the next time you’re tempted to kidnap someone else’s research, remember this interview. Acknowledge your source. It’s that simple.”
As he leaves, head down, muttering “Thank you, thank you,” Roberta thinks of the days when she would have driven a stake into Bryan’s heart and left him to bleed. Until today, she has stood strong against academic dishonesty. She does everything in her power to avoid the possibility of plagiarism. She changes the essay topics each year, looks over her students’ thesis statements, gives advice on their outlines and first drafts, teaches them the way to give simple acknowledgements in parentheses instead of coping with old-fashioned footnotes.
But now, she finds herself incapable of taking a high moral tone. She thinks of all those magazines from which she cribbed ideas for the dirty details of Mira’s story. Is she likely to include an Author’s Note for the back page? Something along the lines of “Heartfelt appreciation to the writers of French Girls, Lolita Mag, Transsex, and GangBang for supplying ideas for the sleaze that inspired this book.” Yeah, sure.
Time for class now. She dons her academic gown, a tradition of stuffy old Trinity that she has always liked — right from the days when it covered her pyjamas in the dining hall at breakfast — and heads off to Room 101 for her Classics in Translation group.
Halfway down the hall, she meets Trinity’s Chaucer scholar, Joan Wishart. Her dyed black curls have been carefully gelled, and she is actually wearing red tights, perhaps to evoke the Wife of Bath.
“Welcome back, Roberta.”
“Thanks, I’m—”
“I just found out from that wretched Muna Mehta that you gave her eighty on her first essay, and now she’s down my neck because she got sixty-five on her Chaucer essay. You really do fling marks about. We’ve got to keep standards up. It’s shocking the way they’ve declined since I was a student.”
“I can’t talk for long now, Joan. Sorry. I’ve got a class. But I’m wondering … have you kept your own undergraduate essays from the Golden Age?”
Joan puffs out her little bosom and smiles, nodding. “My average, as I recall, was an overall eighty-five.”
“Well, take a look at them sometime. They’ll give you a dose of reality. I read aloud my own seventeen-year-old views on ‘Christianity in the Light of the Nuclear Age’ to a group of dinner guests recently, and we laughed ourselves silly. And my dear old prof had given me an
eighty-one for my adolescent idiocies.”
She steps around Joan and moves on. As she walks through the door of her classroom, she notices that her students are all in place, obviously waiting for her, though she is not a second late. The buzz of conversation stops, there is a scraping of chairs, and the crash of a lecture board onto the floor, and suddenly, they are all on their feet applauding.
“Way to go,” says a tall lad at the front of the room.
“What’s it all about?” Roberta knows she must have a stupid look on her face. Have they heard her put-down of Wishart?
“Welcome back, and congrats on The Cretan Manuscripts. We haven’t had a chance to say this before.”
And now they’re all chanting, “Way to go. Way to go.”
“What a pleasant surprise,” Roberta says, making a small bow. “Thank you.”
She sits down behind her desk on the raised dais, opens her lesson plan book, and with a nod and a smile indicates that it’s time to get serious.
She has noted that all the students have their copies of Ted Hughes’s Tales from Ovid and undoubtedly have even read the sea nymph story in preparation for class. They are a keen bunch notwithstanding Joan Wishart’s dismissive comments about declining academic standards.
“We’ll come back to Doris, Nereus, and their daughter at another lecture,” Roberta says. “I think that since this is my first lesson with you this term, we should talk about the role of translator. We’ll often be reading the same story in several different translations, and we may notice some very divergent takes on the same narrative. So I’ll start with the question. What’s the translator’s role?”
Muna Mehta, Joan’s favourite student, speaks up. She is prepping for a Rhodes scholarship, and Roberta feels she’ll probably be successful, barring a disaster with her Chaucer exam. “I think the ideal translator keeps as close as possible to the wording of the original.”
