Truth and Consequences

by Alison Lurie

  If Mrs. Unger had nothing better to do on Tuesday afternoons she often attended the Fellows’ lectures, and if they displeased her, she complained. “I don’t think Matthew would have cared for that,” was a frequent comment. Jane never answered back. It was necessary to treat Mrs. Unger with great courtesy, since she still owned two-thirds of her husband’s former property, more than an acre of lawn and garden only two blocks from campus. There was almost no department at Corinth University that did not want to get its hands on this land, the carriage house, and the financial portfolio that Lily Unger, who had no children, had inherited.

  Mrs. Unger, who unlike her husband was nobody’s fool, had remained cool to the many chairmen and deans who had urged her to make them a gift of her property and move into an assisted living facility, and she was even more scornful of the people from the Development Office.

  “They must think I’m going soft in the head,” she had once remarked to Jane, to whom, perhaps as a fellow townie, she had taken a liking. “I know perfectly well that as long as I own the property the University will be nice to me. But once I sign it over to them, it’s finished. Poor old Nat Greene, I warned him, hold on to those fields out by the University orchards if you want to keep their respect and your parking permit, but he didn’t listen to me. He gave them the land and they gave him the ceremonial dinner, and the brass plaque, and a lot of pretty thank-you letters on thick cream-colored embossed paper from everyone in Knight Hall, and then they forgot about him, more or less.

  “I’ve made my will,” she had added, “but don’t you tell anyone that, Janey. I want to keep them guessing. That makes it more fun. I want them to think I could change my mind anytime. I could leave the property to the Metropolitan Opera or the Republican Party or a home for orphan cats. Last time I saw that smarmy young woman from Development, at a concert in Bailey Hall it was, I couldn’t stop myself from telling her how I’d been thinking that something should be done for all those AIDS orphans in Africa. She practically turned green.”

  “Oh, I see the new letterhead has come.” Jane indicated a stack of boxes on Susie’s desk. “If you’re not busy, you might distribute some to all the Fellows.”

  “Okay.” Susie rose without complaint and left the office. Though incapable of initiative, she was always accommodating.

  For a moment, Jane sat on, gathering her resources; then she headed for the Emerson Room.

  “Oh, hello there, Janey,” Lily Unger said. She was a small, plump elderly woman with curly white hair and big brown eyes, wearing a flowered silk dress, matching pumps, and an interfering expression. “What on earth has happened to the other red sofa?”

  “It’s been moved upstairs temporarily,” Jane said, thinking that she should have known this question would be asked. Alterations in the structure or furnishings of the mansion always concerned and often annoyed Lily Unger. “One of the Fellows has migraine headaches, she needs to lie down sometimes.”

  “You mean Delia Delaney.”

  “Umhm.”

  “It would have to be her. From what I’ve seen of Selma Schmidt, she never lies down. Wound up tight, like a clock spring.” Lily Unger always took an interest in the current year’s Fellows. If she liked them, she sometimes invited them to lunch and even attempted to read their books. “She looks frustrated. Not married, is she?”

  “No.” Jane neglected to add that Selma was a lesbian feminist, two words that had formerly aroused Lily Unger to rage.

  “I’m not surprised. Most men like a wife to be more restful.” Mrs. Unger smiled. It was clear that in her time she had been able to be, or at least to appear, restful. “Delia Delaney’s married, though.”

  “Oh yes.”

  “Been married three times, I hear.”

  “I don’t think it’s that many,” Jane said. “Two, maybe.”

  “Three.” Mrs. Unger spoke with authority.

  “Really? Where did you hear that?” Lily Unger sometimes proffered information of this sort, which often later turned out to be correct.

  “Oh, here and there.” It was typical of Lily not to reveal her sources. “I’ve got nothing against it, if she can stand the strain. This current one is good-looking, anyhow. But I’m afraid he’s a tame man.”

  “Really.” Jane’s conscious opinion of Henry was not wholly favorable, but this statement annoyed her. “How do you mean?”

  “You know, like those tigers in the circus. You often see women who look like Delia there. Same hair, same sort of figure. It’s amazing what they can do with a whip and a little gilt chair. But of course it’s not so easy to tame something that size. Eventually those beasts can rebel and maul you, I saw it happen once—” Lily broke off as, from overhead there came a sound somewhere between a squeak and a scream. “Heavens, what was that?”

  “I don’t know.” For a moment, Jane’s mind remained occupied by a vision of Henry Hull transformed into a tiger and snarling on a stool in a circus ring, with Delia Delaney, in spangles and tights, cracking a whip at him.

  “Jane, I have to talk to you!” Susie cried, rushing into the Emerson Room; her face was damp and flushed.

  “Yes, what is it?” Jane lowered her voice; but Lily Unger, exercising her self-assumed proprietary privileges, followed them into the hall.

  “It’s that Professor Amir,” Susie gasped, choking back a sob. “He sort of just grabbed me.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. That’s awful. Where did he grab you?”

  “Right there in his office. I brought him the letterhead, like you told me, and he said could I put it on his desk, and so I did, and he said something in a funny language, and then he sort of grabbed me and kissed me.” Susie indicated a blur of pink lipstick around her mouth and began to cry.

  “I’m so sorry,” Jane repeated.

  “I never did feel comfortable around him from the start,” Susie gasped. “He always looks so sort of sad and starving.”

  “I know what you mean,” Jane admitted. It was true that Professor Charlie Amir had a hungry look. His wife had gone back to Europe to visit her family, so that he was alone in Corinth for the time being, and Jane had sometimes wondered if he was getting enough to eat. “Don’t worry, he won’t bother you again. We’ll talk to him.”

  “I can’t talk to him,” Susie said with a sob.

  “You don’t have to. I’ll do it, and if that doesn’t work, Bill Laird will. We’ll tell him that if he tries anything like that again he’ll be really sorry. Now why don’t you go and wash your face, and then maybe you could type up a report of what happened, just like you told me. After that you can go home, if you like.”

  “No thanks,” Susie choked down a final sob. “I feel better now.”

  “It was that skinny one with the beard, wasn’t it?” Lily Unger said after Susie had gone. “Comes from somewhere in Eastern Europe, doesn’t he? They aren’t brought up to respect women over there, not like here in America.”

  “I’m sure some of them are,” Jane said.

  “But this one wasn’t.”

  “No, I guess not.” Jane frowned as she began to consider the possible consequences of this fact.

  “Of course you have to speak to him,” Lily Unger continued. “But I do think there’s too much fuss made about this so-called sexual harassment these days. When I was first working, back in the forties, there were guys like that in every office. It was an occupational hazard, sure, but nobody got hysterical about it. When you first started the job the other girls warned you. ‘Don’t go into Mr. Smithers’s office alone,’ I remember Margie, the office manager, telling me on my first day at the bank. ‘He can’t keep his hands to himself. Make some excuse if you can, and if you can’t, stay on the other side of the desk,’ that’s what she told me. ‘And if he tries anything, scream.’ Creeps like that, they’re not going to rape anyone. They don’t want to cause a commotion, all they want is to cop a feel. A little noise and they back off.”

  “I hope so,” Jane said. “I guess I’d better go
talk to him now, if you’ll excuse me.”

  “Would you like me to come too?”

  “No thanks,” Jane said, though at the same time it occurred to her that Mrs. Unger’s disapproval might be more effective than her own. “Not yet, anyhow.”

  “Well, just let me know if I can help,” Lily Unger said, giving Jane a disappointed glance as she left the room and headed toward the stairs.

  In the upstairs hall Jane hesitated, looking toward Charlie Amir’s office and trying to plan what she would say. Charlie was the youngest Fellow, only in his early thirties, but he had already distinguished himself as an economist. Born in Bosnia, he had somehow managed to attend London University, and his growing reputation had won him fellowships to Oxford and a tenure-track appointment at the University of Ohio. His current interest was in the economics of the Catholic Church, and he was writing a book about the church as a landowner in Central Europe, from a Marxist revisionist point of view.

  In person Charlie seemed pleasant and rather shy, but two letters of recommendation had called him brilliant, which meant that his mind probably worked faster than hers did. Jane told herself that she must speak slowly and not make any mistakes, in case the matter ended up in the office of the University ombudsman, an apparently neutral but frighteningly powerful person. But what should she say?

  She looked toward the door of Alan’s office, which was shut. But he was there, she knew: she could tell him what had happened, and receive his sympathy and advice. As a former department chairman he had dealt with similar cases. But two things stopped her: first, the closed door, which in their private code meant that the person inside could only be disturbed in an emergency; and second, the fact that since he had developed back trouble her husband did not always seem able to offer either sympathy or advice.

  Well, but this was an emergency, sort of, Jane told herself. Approaching Alan’s door, she knocked lightly. When there was no answer she quietly turned the handle. There was nobody at the desk, but something like a bundle of clothes with wires coming out of it lay on the sofa. It was Alan, she realized, curled in a semi-fetal position with his back to her. Wires were running out of his ears and attached to a tape-playing device. Another set of wires ran from his lower back to a black electronic box that was supposed to block pain signals. In the last few months since he got this box Alan had spent more and more time like this, lying on a bed or a sofa and listening to music or to books on tape. When interrupted he was always disoriented and sometimes irritated.

  As silently as possible, Jane closed the door.

  The door of Charlie Amir’s office was open, and he was sitting at his desk rolling a yellow pencil about nervously.

  “Professor Amir—”

  “I know why you’ve come,” he interrupted. “I am very sorry, I am acting very wrongly.” Charlie Amir was a pleasant-faced young man, with curly light-brown hair and a short curly beard. Ordinarily his English was excellent, but Jane had noticed already that in a crisis (the breakdown of the copier, for instance) it began to fail.

  “You’ve upset Susie very much.”

  “Yes, yes,” he agreed.

  “We can’t have that sort of thing here, you know,” she continued. “This isn’t Bosnia.”

  “I do nothing like that in Bosnia, never anywhere, I swear by God,” Charlie protested. “I am very sorry, Mrs. Mackenzie, I have so much strain now. You know my wife, she went home this summer to see her family, and she was to come back now, to join me?”

  “Yes, I know,” Jane said.

  “But now she says on the telephone that she did not get a permit. Why does she say that, when already she has a permit?”

  “I don’t know,” Jane said weakly.

  “I know what you are thinking, you are thinking maybe she does not want to return to America.”

  “No, I—”

  “I am thinking this too. She is never happy here. And she has many friends who say to her two years ago, when I get the job in Ohio, do not go, America is an evil country. Her mother says this also, continuously.”

  “I’m sorry,” Jane said.

  “I don’t feel so good then, you know. It is always in my mind. So I do wrong, and I am very sorry, and also about the steps.”

  “Steps? What steps?”

  “Yesterday, when we were moving up the sofa, a pole of the steps was broken, by me. And I acted wrongly, I didn’t admit—I was afraid to lose my fellowship. But I told Susie this afternoon, she should give me the bill, and I will pay, but please not to tell anyone. And she is so kind, she says never mind, they will fix it anyhow, no need to pay. So I don’t know what happened, but I looked at her, and I wanted to embrace her, to thank her. I did not mean any harm.”

  “Maybe not,” Jane said. “But you’ve upset Susie, and it’s got to stop. I won’t say anything more about it to anyone. But I have to tell you, there will be a report. And if there are any more incidents there could be an official inquiry, and sometimes this is a very unpleasant process.”

  Charlie Amir visibly flinched and looked stricken, and Jane realized that in his country of origin her statement would probably have suggested something far harsher than a reprimand from the ombudsman or even the loss of a fellowship. “You threaten me,” he said bleakly.

  “No, no. I only warn you,” Jane hastened to say, so rapidly that she found herself adopting Professor Amir’s diction. “Really.”

  “I understand. I will be careful. Also I will apologize to Susie.”

  “That’s a good idea. But maybe it might be better if you just wrote her a note.”

  “You think?”

  Jane nodded.

  “Very well, I will do that.” For the first time, Professor Amir seemed to relax. “I am sorry that I have disturbed her, you know, she is so pretty and soft and kind. She is like the peaches in my country.”

  And I’m not, Jane thought as she left the office. Well, too bad. Somebody has to have some backbone around here. But why does it have to be me? Why do I always have to do everything? An uneasy echo sounded in her head, of something Lily Unger had said, what? Yes, that Henry Hull did everything. But it wasn’t the same, Jane thought, because Delia didn’t need everything done, she wasn’t really ill.

  But the result was the same. She was always tense and tired lately, probably because she had so much more work at home. Not only all the usual cooking and cleaning and shopping and errands, but everything Alan used to do: the dishes and the laundry and the household repairs, taking the newspapers and bottles and cans and trash out, dragging the garbage cans and recycling bins up the steep driveway to the road and then down again. And rewiring lamps and hanging the new shower curtain, putting up the storm windows, raking the leaves, unblocking the sink, changing the furnace filters, and replacing bulbs in ceiling fixtures. For a long while she had seen it as temporary. She had kept telling herself that for a while she would have to do these things, but then it would be over.

  Because it wasn’t fair now, it wasn’t right. Though healthy, compared to Alan Jane was small and slight, barely five-foot-two. In the past one of the many things she had loved and admired about her husband was his height and strength: the easy, casual way he could lift heavy boxes of books and open bottles and reach things on top shelves. But last spring, when Alan went to have his operation, Jane had had to carry everything and drag both their suitcases and lift them onto the X-ray machine, while Alan just stood there, leaning on his cane and looking off into the distance as if he weren’t involved and had never even met her. He had probably been embarrassed; she recognized that. But the bottom line was that she had had to do everything on that trip and she still had to do everything, and though she shouldn’t, she resented it, and sometimes even showed this, and she was slowly but steadily turning into a mean, resentful person.

  SIX

  Outside Alan’s window at the Unger Center the sky was a bland blue, the maples a cheerful chrome yellow, and none of the people passing along the sidewalk were running or screaming.
There was no sign that since last Tuesday the University, the town, and the nation had been in a state of shock. Over three thousand people had died in the World Trade Center, and as Susie Burdett, in the Center office downstairs, had put it, weeping, nowhere seemed nice and safe anymore.

  Alan had agreed with her, without adding that for him this was not new—that nowhere had seemed nice and safe to him for the last eighteen months. Ever since the lizard moved into his back the world had been full of hazards: noisy gangs of students that might knock him over in the hallways; cars that might hit him as he slowly and painfully, leaning on his cane, made his way from the parking lot to his office; chairs and beds that were agony to sit or lie in; irregularities in the natural landscape that might trip him up and make his pain worse.

  Alan had always thought of the World Trade Center as a rather banal structure; if in the past he had been asked whether it should be torn down for aesthetic reasons, he might have said yes. But its sudden destruction had affected him like a physical blow. Last Tuesday, alerted by a phone call from a colleague, he had stood in his sitting room watching a TV replay of that horrible and unbelievable event. As the first plane hit, he felt a sudden, much sharper pain in his back, exactly as if his spine were the inner armature of a skyscraper into which something had just crashed. He gasped for air, felt dizzy, and had to lie down on the sofa.

  The president of the University and his colleagues in Knight Hall, predictably, had announced to what they sometimes called the Corinth Community (thus including both town and gown) that life and classes must go on—indeed that to cause them to go on was everyone’s patriotic and academic duty. Alan’s particular duty, apparently, as the senior Faculty Fellow at the Center, was to deliver his lecture on religious architecture, titled “Houses of God” and scheduled for that afternoon. In the light of the morning’s events it seemed totally irrelevant to him, and he had e-mailed the chairman of the Humanities Council, Bill Laird, to say so. Bill had e-mailed him back, agreeing and suggesting they reschedule the talk for the following week, at the same time quietly deploring the president’s speech.