The Raven and the Nightingale

by Joanne Dobson

  Sophia was behind the counter at Bread and Roses, serving eggnog and fruitcake to a couple of indeterminate sex who wore green and red jingle bells in their earlobes. The air was redolent with cinnamon. The notion of such rich fare so early in the morning gagged me.

  “Karen,” Sophia said, as I ordered my breakfast coffee and scone, “have you heard anything from Professor Birdwort?”

  “Jane? No.…”

  “She was in here earlier. She said she tried to find you on campus yesterday afternoon, but you weren’t around. I’m really worried about her; she seems a little … irrational. She said she wanted to talk to you about the shoes. Does that make any sense to you?”

  “No.” Then I thought about my conversation with Jane at the Christmas party. I’d asked her about the red shoes in her poem. “Well, maybe.”

  “She said she’d look for you in your office today.”

  “Great,” I said, then hoped I didn’t sound sarcastic. But, really, that’s all I needed, a conversation with an irrational poet about red shoes. Maybe I should just abandon the office and hide in the library to finish grading my papers.

  Greg and I carried our cups to a table by the window. “So,” he asked, “what’re you doing for Christmas?” For Greg, Christmas involves weeks and weeks of gleeful preparations.

  “Just the usual. Me and Amanda at home. What about you?”

  “We’ve got big plans. Christmas Eve we’re going to my folks’ house. It’ll be the first Christmas with the babies, and it’ll be a mob scene: Everyone wants to see them. Then for Christmas dinner we’re going to Greenwich—”

  “You are? Things are better with Irena’s family, then?”

  “We’ve produced grandchildren. ’Nuff said?”

  We both laughed.

  “But what about you, Karen? Don’t you have family to go to for the holiday? You never talk about them, but you and Amanda must have someone …”

  “You’re right, Greg, I don’t talk about them. And I have my reasons.” Suddenly the memory of my mother in a flowered apron baking the Christmas tourtière flooded me with a longing so unexpected and intense, I could all but smell the meat and spices sizzling in the iron skillet on the old gas-burning stove in the overheated kitchen. What was it with these flashbacks? Now they had my eyes watering.

  “Karen?” Greg leaned forward and took my hand. “Karen, are you okay?”

  “Uh-huh,” I replied, swallowing the last of my coffee. “Hey, listen, Greg, I’ve got to go. I’ve got work to do.”

  The library was almost deserted as I placed my little pile—papers, grade book, grade sheets, red pencil—on the dark oak top of my favorite third-floor corner desk. I often came here, to this secluded nook in the American Literature section, when I needed some quiet time alone. No sooner had I set pencil to paper, however, than Jane Birdwort rounded the corner. She wore the regulation New England winter uniform of heavy jacket and heavy boots, and carried her battered leather book bag.

  “Monica told me you’d be here,” Jane said without preamble. “She said you always hide out in the PS section when you don’t want anyone to find you.” She must have hustled from Dickinson Hall, she was so out of breath.

  “Right,” I replied, pointedly, “I do. I’m trying to finish these papers. Grades are due today.”

  “Oh, that.” She waved a slender hand dismissively. “I hear they don’t really bother you for the grade sheets until after New Year’s.”

  Her cavalier attitude annoyed me. After all, what did Jane have to grade? A few poems? How hard could that be? And how did you grade a poem anyhow? A-plus for Emily Dickinson and her pre-modernist experimentation with oblique referentiality? C-minus for e. e. cummings and his lack of proper capitalization?

  “For regular faculty,” I snapped, “the grades have to be in on time.” I immediately regretted my irritable retort, but it was too late.

  Jane gave me a cool stare. “Oh,” she said, “I’m sorry. I just thought you wanted to know about Elliot and the red shoes.” Her expression was oddly intent. “But if you’re too busy …”

  She turned abruptly on the chunky heel of her drab brown boot and huffed away.

  “Jane …” I called apologetically, but either she didn’t hear me, or she was terminally offended, because she didn’t look back.

  Frederica Whitby’s FroshHum final exam was the last essay I graded, and it was barely passable. My red pencil hovered over the bluebook’s front cover: D? Or F? I sat in my dim library nook with the pencil gone suddenly limp in my hand, unexpectedly overwhelmed by the cloud of gloom that seemed to have shadowed my life ever since Elliot Corbin’s death. Someone had killed my colleague, a man whose reverberant voice had been a neighboring presence—irritating, but undeniably alive and vibrant—in my daily interactions with students. The rituals of academic life seemed inane. D? Or F? F? Or D? What was the point? What difference did it really make? While I pondered Elliot Corbin’s murder and the broader mysteries of life, I doodled aimlessly on the cover of Freddie’s exam book. Elliot was a lopsided circle in the middle of the page and Jane and Monica appeared as ovals. As an afterthought I added a third oval: Mike’s mother, Angela Vitale McDonald. Mike and Joey took the form of second-generation triangles. Elliot’s long history of twisted, exploitative relationships with people like Monica and Jane inscribed itself on the robin’s-egg-hued paper as an indecipherable tangle of crimson pencil marks. I moistened the tip of my pencil with my tongue while I contemplated further, then added Harriet Person. Harriet was inscribed as a circle, to the bottom of which I whimsically added a little penciled cross. Then I sat back and studied my jottings: Poor Elliot. The man seemed to have outraged or alienated almost every woman he’d ever come across. I idly doodled another oval and penned in another name. Then the pencil dropped from my fingers, and I stared in stunned revelation at the suddenly meaningful scribbles on the bluebook cover. Heart racing, I scooped up Freddie’s ungraded essay, and packed it away with the others in my canvas book bag. Jane was right; I could get away with turning my grades in late. What were they going to do? Shoot me? Right now I wanted lunch and a talk, and I wanted them both with the sometimes irritating but always insightful investigator Lieutenant Piotrowski.

  The lieutenant was busy until supper time, he told me over the phone. My disappointment brought me up short. But, then, who did I think I was, anyhow? A woman who snaps her fingers and police detectives jump? Piotrowski would meet me at Amazing Chinese at six P.M., or as soon thereafter as he could make it. I would have to be satisfied with that.

  Back in my office, I pulled out my grade sheet, about to mark a D as Freddie Whitby’s course grade in the one remaining blank space. What good would it do to give her an F and fail her in the course? I picked up the black pen I use for recording grades, and it hovered over the grade sheet’s marking grid. Then I let it drop and sat back in my chair. Had I exhausted all avenues of research for the source of Freddie’s obviously plagiarized paper? No, I hadn’t. I hadn’t even found time to check out the university’s library. That was something I could do this afternoon, before I met Piotrowski. I sighed with frustration; the last thing I needed was a twenty-minute drive to Amherst, endless circling to find a parking space on the vast campus, a search through the shelves of the PS section, decimated at this time of semester by students writing research papers. It would surely be a futile effort, but I simply couldn’t not do it. I couldn’t bring myself to pass Freddie Whitby if I hadn’t done absolutely everything I could to find the source from which she had cribbed her paper.

  I loaded my book bag, making certain Freddie’s paper was there, buttoned my long black wool coat, pulled the burgundy knitted cap down over my ears, slipped on my gloves, closed the office door behind me. From Monica’s office I could hear little Joey’s voice. “Vroom,” he vroomed. “Vrrooomm. Red Baron at three o’clock!” He was playing games on Monica’s computer again.

  I stood with my gloved hand on the doorknob. Computer. Computer? Computer!
The key slid back into the keyhole automatically, with no conscious direction on my part. I dropped the book bag inside the door, peeled off my gloves, and plopped down at the computer without removing my coat. Once online, I called up the net browser, pulled out Freddie’s paper one last time and set it on my lap, looked over the suspect language, and keyed in: “ ‘The Raven’ functions as surreal trope for a pre-modernist unknowing” making certain to include the quotation marks that would tell the Internet I was searching for an identical phrase. Instantly, up popped a familiar paragraph on the screen, part of a long essay:

  “As a case in point, the infamous bird in Poe’s ‘The Raven’ functions as surreal trope for a pre-modernist unknowing, as emblem of an existentialist angst prescient of post-Freudian, post-Christian poesis, as enigmatic metaphor for a poetics of the abyss.”

  I sat back in my chair, almost weak with victory. Gotcha, you brat! Gotcha!

  After I’d called to inform Earlene of my discovery, written the formal plagiarism report—with documentation—then submitted my completed grade sheet to the Registrar, I left campus on foot, heading for Jill’s. I needed to see little Eloise and get myself a redeeming fix of sweetness and light. After all, isn’t Christmas all about children? As I rounded the corner, a green Volvo pulled up to the big Victorian house. A short, balding man and a tall, red-haired woman, both in Abercrombie country wear, strode eagerly down the walk toward Jill and Eloise, silhouetted in the doorway. Kenny stood to one side, as if he wasn’t quite certain of his role in this family scene. Neither was I.

  I walked back to campus, fired up the Jetta, and spent the afternoon at the mall, Christmas shopping. Aside from three big cloth dolls for the three infants in my life, it was a bust. The feeling of accomplishment I’d had in my office had faded almost immediately: finding Freddie’s source had left me, ultimately, with nothing but a bad taste in my mouth. And, I had to admit it: I was lonely. Aside from Amanda, I had only the family I’d made for myself here in Enfield, and they all seemed to be preoccupied with families of their own. Added to this sense of isolation there were, of course, my disquieting speculations about Elliot’s violent death. I was too restless to begin any scholarly projects, too morose to do any holiday shopping, and too nervous to go home.

  It was dark when I left the mall at five-thirty. The snow had melted, and the cold sky was choked with gray scrub-mop clouds through which neither moon nor stars could be discerned. A week before Christmas, and it still seemed more like Poe’s “drear November” than the holly-jolly festive season.

  When I pushed open the big glass door at Amazing Chinese, Piotrowski was already settled in a booth at the rear of the restaurant. His short hair was slicked back, as if he’d just run a damp comb through it, and his gray cable-knit sweater retained ghosts of department-store folds, as if only that afternoon it had resided with its clones on the Extra Large shelf in Filene’s men’s department. His broad Slavic face with its high cheekbones shone, perhaps from the recent application of a damp towel. In other words, the lieutenant looked as if he’d prepped for this meeting. He looked good.

  I, on the other hand, had done nothing to alter my countenance, hair, or black turtleneck and jeans since I’d left home that morning. Plus, I suffered from a hideous case of mall-face, the disfiguring ailment in which everything I’d ever thought even the least bit attractive about myself had been systematically obliterated by hours of relentless fluorescent-light comparison with the flawless features of department-store mannequins and makeup consultants.

  I slid into the booth, thanked the lieutenant for meeting me, ordered the restaurant’s irresistible General Tso’s Chicken, then pulled out Freddie Whitby’s exam book with its crimson-scrawled blue cover. “Now, Lieutenant, I may be way off the wall here, but let me tell you what I think.”

  26.

  She dealt her pretty words like Blades——

  How glittering they shone——

  And every One unbared a Nerve

  Or wantoned with a Bone——

  —EMILY DICKINSON

  AN HOUR LATER I WAS riding shotgun when Piotrowski’s Jeep pulled into the long driveway of Elliot Corbin’s house, maneuvering the icy ruts as smoothly as if it were on steel tracks. The day before, I’d watched Monica replace the back-door key under a fake rock by the steps, and, by the light of the lieutenant’s high-intensity flashlight, I retrieved that key, offering it to him with a flourish. The door opened with its usual grating creak, and I stood once again in Elliot’s gloomy kitchen.

  As we traversed the house from the kitchen to the study, I switched on one light after another. I knew exactly where I was going and exactly what I was looking for. The folder of graduate-student papers was right where I remembered, in a hanging file in the lower drawer of Elliot’s bloodstained desk. I pulled the folder out and leafed through it until I found the essay I sought. It was entitled “Poe in a Dress: Deconstructing Sex and Gender in the Verse of Edgar Allan Poe.”

  “Eureka!”

  “You found it?” Piotrowski peered over my shoulder at the typed essay. Elliot’s bold blue comments adorned the first page. “An A-plus, huh? Must be real smart.”

  “I’m sure of that,” I replied. “No one who wasn’t smart could write quite so badly.” I leafed through the essay to the end, grimacing at the convoluted, jargonladen prose. At the bottom of the final page was a blueink note in Elliot’s blocky handwriting: Cutting-edge work, if seriously underdeveloped. Please see me after class about possibilities that might work to your advantage.

  “You know what’s odd about this?” I demanded of Piotrowski.

  “The whole thing is odd,” he responded, taking the essay by its edges and turning back to the opening page. “I mean, listen, I went to college, ya know. I never got to finish—but I went. But, ya know, I don’t understand a word of this thing. What the hell is … er … ‘postsemiotic deconstructive epistemology’?”

  I flipped a hand at him. “You’re not supposed to understand it. That’s the whole point. But, look, all the other grad essays here are photocopies. This is the original. What do you suppose that means?”

  “You tell me. You’re the expert here. And you’re the one who knows Amber Nichols.”

  Amber Nichols. If I was right in my speculations, the Enfield College adjunct instructor had committed a heinous crime in this disordered study. I glanced around and shuddered when my gaze paused at the soaked-in bloodstain now permanently marring Elliot’s oak desk. “Can we go somewhere else? This room gives me the creeps.”

  “How about the kitchen?”

  “That’s not a hell of a lot better,” I replied, “but at least there won’t be blood on the Formica.”

  Overgrown branches tapped and scratched on the kitchen window panes, as if they were malevolent limbs from the ghastly decaying trees of the House of Usher itself. The lieutenant pulled out a chair and lowered his bulky body into it, then he reached into the pocket of his heavy gray jacket for a tissue to wipe his glasses. “So—what’re ya thinking, Doctor?” Along with one of his ubiquitous Kleenex packets, Piotrowski retrieved the two cellophane-wrapped fortune cookies we’d been too rushed to open before we’d left the restaurant. He eyed the cookies contemplatively, then shoved one in my direction and began to strip the wrapper from the other.

  I sat across from Piotrowski and rubbed my eyes; it wasn’t late, maybe seven-thirty, but it seemed like midnight. Despite my warm jacket, I shivered in the cold. Then I jumped up from the table and twisted the corroded thermostat by the door to the butler’s pantry. Something snagged my attention as I glanced around the kitchen, something that was … missing. That was it—something that was supposed to be here, something I was used to seeing in this room, was gone, but what?

  In the depths of the house, the furnace kicked on with a thunk and a groan. I jumped wildly, and Piotrowski let loose with a seemingly involuntary guffaw. I glared. He was smiling at me, almost … affectionately. I instantly assumed my most authoritative pedagogica
l manner; no cop was going to patronize me and get away with it. “As I said at dinner, Lieutenant, I think you can add Amber Nichols to your list of serious suspects in the murder of Elliot Corbin. And this”—I tapped the cover sheet of the essay manuscript with a tutorial forefinger—“is why.” I sat down again, leaned back in my chair, and raised an eyebrow. He met my gaze and waited, lips tight in an effort to suppress a grin. So, it was going to be like that, was it? I picked up the fortune cookie, broke it open, took a careless glance at the fortune, popped the crisp cookie half in my mouth, and crunched down. The words on the narrow paper strip meant nothing. Just another generic Chinese restaurant fortune: Happiness is close by. Reach out and grab it.

  I let the weightless scrap of paper flutter to the floor, and considered the man across the table. Ragged eyebrows furrowed in a crooked V; his fleeting amusement had been replaced by impatience. Well, okay—maybe I’d made him wait long enough. “You see, Lieutenant, I think Elliot Corbin used this essay of Amber’s as the basis for the book on Poe that made him famous. The title of her paper is ‘Poe in a Dress.’ It’s dated four years ago. Elliot’s book was called The Transvestite Poe. It was published … oh, maybe … eighteen months ago. Plenty of time for him to rewrite—”

  “Transvestite, huh?” Piotrowski interrupted. “Edgar Allan Poe was into that kinky cross-dressing stuff? Or … you think Corbin was?”

  I grinned at the notion of my goateed colleague in Victoria’s Secret panties and bra. “Well, no, not really. This would be more … ah, semiotic than sexual.”

  “Ah.” Piotrowski’s coffee-brown eyes didn’t flicker; you’d have thought he had at least a full semester of grad school in literary theory.

  “You see, what I think is that … well … you know, Elliot’s career had been flagging for years—decades, really. Then, suddenly, out of a cloudless empyrean comes this wildly successful little book on Poe. I think when he read Amber’s essay, he saw its potential and somehow coerced her into letting him claim her work as his own. I mean, look, he still has the original paper here. Teachers usually give papers back to students after grading them. Maybe he bribed Amber, offered to mentor her in exchange for her ideas—you know, get her on conference panels, introduce her to influential scholars, write letters of recommendation. Or maybe he simply paid her for the paper. Grad students really struggle to get by. A few thousand bucks would go a long way.”