The Raven and the Nightingale

by Joanne Dobson

  “Wh-who?” I stuttered, as I regained my equilibrium.

  “That one.” The small woman in the drab quilted jacket pointed at a bulky figure just disappearing around the corner of the college library. The short, stocky shape was easily recognizable as that of Monica Cassale. Funny, the English Department office had been unlit and locked for at least an hour; I’d assumed she’d left campus long ago.

  “Monica? Well, she’s not the friendliest person in the world,” I replied, “but I wouldn’t exactly call her a witch.”

  “She’s a witch,” Jane asserted, nodding sagaciously. “She—”

  The massive Dickinson Hall door creaked open. As Elliot Corbin advanced down the granite steps, Jane put her finger to her lips, as if to vow me to silence, and scurried away into the darkness. I stared after her, until she vanished in the same general direction as Monica. Had Jane been standing there waiting for that one brief glimpse of Elliot? But why?

  Lights flickered on in dormitory windows as students returned from dinner and prepared for Friday-night dissipations. The library, just to the left of me, was lit up like the Titanic, but the academic departmental buildings clustered around the oval campus common were dark. Not many Enfield professors had as little to do on a Friday evening as I did. A chill wind whistled around the corner of Dickinson Hall and blustered through my wool jacket. Winter was lurking somewhere behind the placid facades of this tidy New England campus, and I was in no way prepared. I followed Elliot in the general direction of the parking lot. Thoughts of the lonely bed awaiting me did nothing to take the bone-numbing chill out of the walk. He got into a red BMW. I got into my ten-year-old gray Jetta. The Jetta’s failing heater gave off about as much warmth as a mouse panting on my ankle. I’m certain my colleague was as toasty as his distinguished career could make him.

  The phone began ringing the second I inserted my key in the deadbolt keyhole. I counted one ring as I turned the bolt, then two more as I fumbled with my key-ring in an effort to find the other doorkey. On some evenings the moon and stars would have provided key-light, but not tonight, and at seven-fifteen that morning, rushing to get to class on time, I hadn’t found it essential to turn on the outside light. I was operating in the Stygian darkness of a narrow porch attached to a small house on a country road with no visible neighbors. On the fourth ring of the phone I found the key. Five. Six. I found the keyhole. Seven. Eight. The door slammed behind me as I dropped my book bag on the floor and sprinted toward the kitchen. On the ninth ring I knocked my shin on an end table in the unlit living room. Just as the tenth ring began, I grabbed the phone. “Karen? Help!” choked a distraught voice on the other end of the line.

  “Jill? My God! What’s the matter?” The overhead light flared on as I flicked the wall switch.

  “You’ve gotta help me,” she sobbed, “before I do something violent.”

  “Whaa?” I was used to Jill Greenberg’s hyperbole, but my young friend had never threatened violence before.

  “Oh, Karen, she’s been screaming all day, and I can’t make her stop! I’ve tried everything, and nothing works. Now I’ve started screaming back. Who knows what I’ll do next!”

  “Oh, you mean Eloise!” I relaxed. Jill’s baby was four weeks old. The infant had inherited not only her mother’s red hair, but, obviously, her relentless determination as well.

  “Yeah. Eloise! Nothing’s wrong with her, but she won’t listen to reason; she just keeps on screaming. I never heard anything like it. I don’t know what to do. Oh, I’m such a terrible mother!”

  Listen to reason? A new-born baby? “Jill, you’re not a terrible mother. You’re just overwhelmed—it’s all so new to you. What can I do to help?”

  “Kenny says if I want to go out for a while, he’ll watch her. He says I’ve just got to relax. So I thought maybe you and I could get a bite somewhere.” Kenny Halvorsen was Jill’s neighbor. He lived in the other first-floor apartment in the sprawling college-owned Victorian that housed half a dozen faculty members. Big blond Kenny, the soccer coach, had taken on the role of Jill’s friendly protector, but I’d suspected for some time that his feelings for her had become a bit more complicated than that.

  In the month since Eloise’s birth, Kenny had become a surrogate uncle and I’d become a surrogate aunt. Jill needed all the help she could get; the father of her child was five-months dead—and probably wouldn’t have been on the scene had he been living. Jill seemed to prefer that kind of guy—the irresponsible kind, not the deceased kind.

  A half hour later, having changed my teaching duds for jeans and an acid-green sweater, I was back in Enfield, at the Blue Dolphin diner. When Jill rushed in fifteen minutes after the appointed time, she threw her arms around me. “I can’t believe it,” she cried. “A night out! Just like a grown-up person!” I hugged her back, then held her at arms’ length to get a good look at her.

  I couldn’t get over the change in Jill. A week before Eloise’s birth, she’d had her wild red-gold curls radically clipped—a “mommy cut,” she’d called it—and, if it weren’t for the newly zaftig nursing-mother bod, she’d have resembled nothing so much as an eight-year-old boy from Norman Rockwell Land.

  “What’re you looking at?” she demanded. Then she gave a little shriek. “Oh, my God! Are my boobs leaking?”

  I laughed. “No, your boobs are fine. It’s just that … that … well … there’s so much of them!”

  “Yeah? Well … every cloud must have a silver lining, they say. I just hope some of it sticks to my boobs. Now, listen, Karen,” she said, beckoning to the waitress, “I don’t want to talk about boobs or babies; I’m starved for food and I’m really starved for gossip. What’s going on at school? Tell me everything.” Jill was on maternity leave from the Sociology Department.

  I filled her in on all the gossip, then told her about that afternoon’s altercation in Elliot Corbin’s office. “Wow!” Jill responded. “He actually said you double-crossing bitch? Who do you think he was talking to? And what do you think it was all about?”

  “I’ve been pondering that …” I paused to order the Blue Dolphin’s famous Friday-night beef stew. Jill requested a bacon cheeseburger, extra-large fries, and a salad with blue-cheese dressing. “… and Monday is the deadline for the Palaver Chair application—”

  “What’s the Palaver Chair?” As I began to answer, she held up a slim hand. “Oh,” she said, looking solemn, “I remember. That was Randy Astin-Berger’s position, wasn’t it?” My colleague Randy had been mysteriously murdered two years earlier, and I’d had a hand in assisting the police investigation.

  “By the way”—without giving me a chance to respond, Jill veered abruptly off the topic—“do you ever see that homicide cop? The lieutenant? You know, the one that you—”

  “Piotrowski? No. Why would I see him?”

  “It’s just … you know … that I thought he was kind of cute, in a very large way. And, you, you’re all alone—”

  “Jill! Give me a break! I do not need another cop in my life. One was enough!” Tony, my ex-boyfriend, was a state police captain in Manhattan, in charge of a drug investigation unit.

  “Yeah, but you really loved Tony, and I don’t think you’ve ever gotten over—”

  “I have so!” I sounded more petulant than I’d meant to. The waitress delivering the tall, sweating glasses of Diet Coke shot me a sympathetic look. Men: Ain’t they the pits?

  I smiled at her meekly, and stripped the wrapper off my straw. “And besides,” I told Jill, lowering my voice, “Piotrowski has no interest in me. He thinks I’m a pain in the neck. And, I don’t even know if he’s married or not.”

  “He doesn’t have that married look.” Jill smiled knowingly. “Methinks the lady—”

  “Give me a break!” I repeated. “Let’s get back to Elliot.… That nasty quarrel I overheard probably had something to do with one of his political machinations.” I told her about how my colleague had been lobbying for the Palaver position.

 
“What’s his research field?” Jill asked.

  “He’s an Edgar Allan Poe scholar. A couple of years ago he came out with a book called The Transvestite Poe.”

  “I saw that on the Enfield authors display shelf in the library. It’s got a really hunky picture of Elliot on the back.”

  “Yeah.” I laughed. “The picture’s even more famous than the book: the scholar as postmodernist pinup boy.” The black-and-white photograph was a dramatic shot of Elliot casually dressed—in black, of course—smiling ambiguously at the camera, with a semi-industrial wasteland in the near background. The book, a cutting-edge investigation of gender fluidity in Poe’s poems and stories, had made Elliott’s current reputation. It had deviated sharply from his earlier, more traditional, work, ending a scholarly dry spell of over a decade, and establishing him on the contemporary map of the American intelligentsia as a fearless avant-garde literary critic. Thus, the plethora of speaking engagements after Elliot’s long academic silence.

  “About Elliot’s book,” I said, cattily, still affronted by his earlier rudeness, “I, personally, thought it was trendy and shallow.”

  “You think that counts for anything? What you, a lowly-worm assistant professor, personally thought?” Jill teased. “Face it, Karen, you’re not the one globe-hopping on the expense accounts of prestigious international institutions of higher learning.”

  “You’re right, of course. But I’m also not the only member of the Enfield English Department who finds Professor Corbin’s reputation just the teensiest bit inflated. Miles Jewell—”

  “Oh, I’ve heard about that. Your chairman has a blow-up of Elliot’s picture taped up in his garage, right? And after department meetings he hurls tournament darts at it.”

  “So they say,” I replied. The beef stew had arrived, and I speared a potato with my fork. “But that’s enough about Elliot Corbin. Let’s talk about you and why you’re feeling so frazzled. And by the way, there’s this little damp circle right in the center of your left breast—”

  Jill gave another little shriek, dropped her burger without taking a bite, and scurried to the ladies’ room.

  4.

  In the swamp in secluded recesses,

  A shy and hidden bird is warbling a song.

  —WALT WHITMAN

  SUNDAY AFTERNOON, ELLIOT CORBIN WAS the first person I noticed as I walked into the Stevens Memorial Community Room at the Enfield Public Library. The decor of the Community Room was muted, blues and grays accented with the warm tones of cherry-red chairs set up in rows before a spare charcoal podium. Dressed in a black turtleneck sweater and off-black jeans, my colleague had placed himself directly in the long, thin strip of wan November light admitted by the room’s one narrow, floor-to-ceiling window. The effect was dramatic. As intended.

  At two o’clock, Jane Birdwort was scheduled to read from her forthcoming book of poems. I was curious about Jane and her work, especially since our odd encounter outside Dickinson Hall Friday evening. And besides, I’d been alone at home grading seminar papers all weekend: Anything was sufficient excuse to get out of the house. One more dangling modifier informing me that Blooming like roses, Emily Dickinson thought of her poems as flowers, and I’d be tempted to proceed directly back to truck-stop waitressing. On an impulse, I’d put the papers aside and changed from my jeans and sweatshirt into a better pair of jeans, a black turtleneck jersey, and a cardigan my daughter Amanda had given me for my birthday, a frivolous thing I would never have purchased for myself, bright persimmon wool knit cropped just at the waist. I donned the brown leather bomber jacket Amanda had not yet taken off to college and checked myself out in the mirror by the front door. Not bad for almost forty.

  The lecture room was not crowded. A few Enfield students—probably members of Jane’s poetry-writing workshop—filled the front row. Several faculty members and a scattering of town residents had taken seats a little farther from the action. Amber Nichols and Ned Hilton sat side by side without speaking. Ned, tall and weedy, was a recently tenured colleague whose office was on the other side of mine from Elliot’s. Amber, honey-hued from her long smooth hair to her slightly tanned skin and beige pantsuit, was an adjunct teacher in the English department. A doctoral candidate at the state university in nearby Amherst, she’d had the supposed good fortune to land a part-time job at Enfield teaching one section of FroshHum. Neither Ned, chronically depressed since a nasty tenure battle, nor Amber, habitually taciturn, tempted me to make any social moves.

  Dressed as usual in tweeds and tie, Miles Jewell stood by the podium, conversing in soft tones with Harriet Person, a senior member of the English Department and Director of the Women’s Studies program. Harriet had forgone her customary severe jacket and pants for jeans and a purple silk shirt. She had also forgone any hint of makeup, but her thin face with its large dark eyes was striking nonetheless, especially given the dramatic streak of white at the left temple of her otherwise dark hair. I was surprised to see this often antagonistic pair so deep in what seemed to be congenial discussion. Harriet’s intent expression and the chairman’s air of fervid agreement intrigued me. Without making a conscious decision to eavesdrop, I found myself wandering toward them. A tall display stand offered an oversized folio of local-history photographs through which to leaf. Thoroughly ashamed of myself, of course, I managed to overhear one enigmatic phrase as Harriet hissed to Miles: “I’m not about to let that s.o.b. screw up all my hard work—”

  “Karen?” A hesitant voice startled me, and I spun around. Sophia Warzek. Sophia was my daughter Amanda’s friend and my former student—and a talented young poet. I abandoned departmental espionage and welcomed her with a hug. Sophia, blond and far too slender, wore the requisite Enfield cold-weather costume of bulky jacket, jeans, and lace-up leather boots. The heavy winter-weight fabrics overpowered her pale beauty. I briefly imagined a makeover for Sophia. Her almost emaciated frame would fit in nicely in lower Manhattan, I thought; with dark lipstick, eyeliner, and clinging layers of Greenwich Village microfiber, she would look every inch the part of the hot young poet. When she smiled tremulously in response to my greeting, the vision vanished. Sophia Warzek had a hard enough time negotiating the relatively uncomplicated social and economic life of Enfield: Manhattan would eat her alive.

  “I wondered,” she faltered, “if I could ask your advice on something?” She clutched a manila file folder to her chest as if she were attempting to keep its contents warm.

  “Sure. I’ve always got time for you.” I sat, and pulled her into the chair next to me. “What’s up?”

  “Well … Professor Birdwort asked a couple of us in her Creative Writing seminar to read one poem each when she’s finished with hers. I wondered if you could help me choose. That is, if you have time.… I mean, I wondered … I mean …”

  After much urging, I’d finally gotten Sophia to drop the Professor Pelletier and simply call me Karen. But her general insecurity and habitual deference to authority weren’t quite so easy to eradicate. Every claim to individual attention, every assertion of her singularity, took an enormous psychic effort. But at least she was finally venturing those claims, no matter how timidly. Her father was in prison, but the effects of his brutal domestic tyranny would always imprint Sophia’s personality. Like me, Sophia had grown up desperately poor. Like mine, her restless mind refused to accept the limitations poverty attempted to impose.

  “Hand ’em over,” I replied cheerily, then opened the folder. The first poem was entitled “Birdsong,” and began: Lonely, the pond keeps its silence … I glanced up at Sophia, smiled, then turned back to the page: lonely, indeed. After two delicate verses on the separation of nature and humanity, the poem concluded:

  I am not tempted by the cry of feathers;

  wings flash ebony and red in vain.

  Only one urgent bird pierces my solitude;

  his shrill remonstrance cannot be called a song.

  Incessant, he tenders his three harsh notes,

  cries, “c
ome away, come away, come away.”

  “This is very nice,” I said sincerely, “this one’s a good possibility,” but before I could read any further, Miles Jewell tapped on the microphone.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, gender- and class-traditional as always, “it is my distinct pleasure to present to you this afternoon Enfield College’s eminent visiting poet, Jane Birdwort. Jane will read to us from her long-awaited forthcoming volume of poems.” The fickle beam of light had deserted Elliot Corbin and now illuminated Miles’s shock of white hair, his round cheeks with their high color.

  Miles led the small audience in applause, and Jane Birdwort stepped primly to the lectern. She wore a pink suit, and her graying hair was curled as if she’d had it cut and permed in her youth—sometime in the late fifties—and had never seen the need to change her style. The vagrant shaft of afternoon sun turned the outdated hairdo to a radiant silver halo. “So very nice to be here,” Jane twittered, then opened her slim book. I settled into my chair, anticipating adept, sensitive poems about birds and flowers. “ ‘Doing Violence,’ ” Jane announced unexpectedly, and the first words jerked me to attention.

  Night and day to cruise

  the streets in my high red boots

  screwing all the sullen gang,

  cigarette hanging from my lip

  like another fang, this is the silent me.

  This one knows death,

  reads the paper, thrives on rape.

  But she is apocryphal.…

  “Wow!” I said, under my breath. “Wow! Who would have thought it!” Jane Birdwort’s demure facade obviously concealed a passionate, and fiercely angry, consciousness.