by Kluge, P. F.
“Class is going good,” she reported. “Some of the women hate Updike. That Rabbit guy’s a heel...” Her voice trailed off. These were English majors, mostly. They were, I warned them, students of literature, not consumers of books. But half were kids whose critical pendulum swung from I-liked-the-book-it-was-well-written-and-I-cared-about-the-characters to it-sucked-I-couldn’t-relate-to-it. As for the distinction between an author and the characters—the idea that they weren’t the same—that was so much professorial nitpicking. “They dig the class, though,” Amy added. “The way you talk and get excited about the books. A lot of people I know are doing the reading. Say, is it true you’re kind of on probation this year?”
“Where’d you hear that?” It still surprised me, how word got around. Amy shrugged. She’d heard it. It was in the water, in the air.
“Well,” I said. “That was last year. I’ve reformed. Hadn’t you noticed?”
“You’re doing terrific now,” Amy assured me. A student consumer enjoying a meal well served, entertained by my jokes, my anecdotes and factoids, my enthusiasm and occasional anger. I was on my way to becoming a popular professor, a colorful character. I was grateful to Amy. She wondered about teaching English in Japan and I’d have perjured myself into hell to help her. “In the novel To Kill a Mockingbird, by the author Harper Lee many important questions are discussed.” That’s how her last paper began. Bummer.
In my writing seminar, I resolved to be generous and funny and un-ironic, a brand new me. They were kids after all, they wanted to know about writing, they were taking a chance on something that involved more than memorizing facts and lectures and putting them in an exam book. In going through writing samples, I looked for funny moments, the spots that came to life, the well-turned phrases, here and there. We’d have our good and bad days, we’d be in it together, I’d share my work with them, they’d show theirs to me. This was where I got to know Jarrett Stark, last year’s plagiarist-complainant. Caroline had decided to give him a WP—withdrew passing—for the course. He agreed to give me another chance. A fire-eater on paper, in person he was a shy, skittish kid, a total loner. After our first seminar, he trailed me to my office. He said he sensed the other students were laughing at him, he wasn’t sure he belonged in the same room with them, he wasn’t certain about college either. As a rule, I think you shouldn’t be in college unless you want to be. But why are the best students the ones with doubts, while the slugs never dream of leaving?
“I’ll be paying off my student loans until I’m thirty,” Stark told me. “For what? Up and down the hall from me there are kids who wait until the night before a paper’s due to start working. Then they crank out some junk, some total bullshit, and they get a B and some of the kids who’ve been killing themselves, writing and revising get maybe a B plus...” Then he caught himself. “Not that I care about grades.”
“Okay,” I said. “What do you care about?”
“You know,” he answered, so intensely I wondered if he were making a pass at me. “I want some of what you have...”
“Some of...”
“I want,” he corrected himself, “more of it than you have. Understand? What you have and more.”
“Which is...”
Without hesitation, he pointed to that spot on the bookshelves, that sacred half inch which accommodated Mistakes, Corrected, my book of poems.
“I want some magic,” Jarrett said.
“Magic?”
“That’s all. All the other stuff I can get cheaper, at other places. On my own, even.”
“And...I’m the chosen magician.”
“I guess.”
“Well then,” I said. “Let’s give it a try.” Next, Jarrett Stark did something that almost never happens between professors and students. He offered me his hand. I paused a second. Then I shook it, sealed the deal. He nodded, his eyes radar-locked on me. It was all a matter of time, only time, that separated Jarrett Stark from me, from T.S. Eliot, from you name it. Only time. He had lots of time, he thought. He dressed in black, he stayed up all night. He wasn’t sure if he was writing poetry or prose “or something new.” My first assignment was a sense of place essay. The others brought in vignettes set in bars and dormitories. Stark came in with a piece set in genocidal Rwanda, Hutus slaughtering Tutsi, told from the point of view of a mountain gorilla. He always came in with something different. And I worked with him, worked through the manuscripts he slipped under my office door in the wee hours of the morning, a random scene set on a winter night at a roadhouse outside a military base, during Vietnam. Told—God, Jarrett!—from the point of view of the jukebox. It was easy to make fun of work from a kid, desperate to be different, whose spelling could always be counted upon for a laugh: a sailor coming in from the cold is worried about penal frostbite, then spots a bunch of semen sitting in the corner. Still, there was something nice going on, a resonance between the songs and the sentiments on the jukebox and the people at the bar, out on the dance floor. The music commented, consoled, prophesied: it did what art did, for people. Now he was dead, killed the same night he dropped the paper off. So there it was: two lives over, two fewer papers to read. A little news, a lot of bad. In the sadness I felt just then, I think, was my discovery that I had a vocation for teaching.
Amy, it turned out, had been making what they call the “walk of shame,” which is what happens when a girl spends the night with a hook-up in a dorm at the south end of campus, where the fraternities are housed, gets out of bed early and heads home along Middle Path, cross-eyed and messy-haired and wearing the same things she was wearing the night before. Amy had hooked up with Jordan Matthiessen from Darien, Connecticut. Their last night together was also their first: they didn’t know each other all that well but a spooked and shaken Jordan—“I never slept with a dead person before this”—explained that some kids started their senior years with lists they want to get through before they graduate, and we’re talking bodies, not books. It’s like the game seniors play in spring before they graduate, when they draw names and chase each other all over campus with water pistols, water rifles, eliminating each other one by one, ambushing each other outside of classrooms and dorms, in bathrooms and from behind bushes. Killer, it’s called. This year a real killer was playing with bullets. One of them found Amy in the back of the head. She was sitting on a bench, waiting for sunrise maybe. When shot, she tumbled forward, onto the gravel path, but the killer must have lifted her back on the bench, displaying Amy the way he’d displayed Martha Yeats. Later I heard people wondering whether he had wanted to dump her right on Warren Niles’ doorstep, a hundred feet across the lawn. But he heard someone coming, another student. Maybe the student saw something, maybe he heard something, so he came rushing to help and took a bullet in his chest that stopped him and spun him around and landed him on the wet grass ten feet behind Amy Plimpton. That was Jarrett Stark.
At seven a.m. an early morning jogger, a student’s mother, runs down Middle Path from north to south, from the old divinity school to the old fraternity dorm, down an alley of maples and chrysanthemums. She enters campus through the gates, sees the bodies, the shock of one and then the other and she finds out for herself that no, this is not a prank or a protest, not an art or drama project. She screams and screams again and no one seems to hear her. She’s wrong. Tom is smoking outside the security building. The minute he hears, he’s on his way but meanwhile the woman rushes to the president’s house. Warren Niles, an on-and-off sleeper in recent years, comes out in his bathrobe to confront the sobbing jogger. Still in his bathrobe and slippers, the college president crosses the lawn in front of his house, arrives at the bench where two dead students and Tom Hoover are waiting for him. In the distance, sirens home in on the little village, ambulances and state police arriving from all directions and a small cluster of onlookers quickly growing as early birds, the ones who pick up their coffee and their New York Times at the college bookstore, find their way over. Every minute brings more people, more ve
hicles: cops put barriers in the road, divert traffic and now the word is out, it gets into the dormitories, it runs up and down the halls, room to room, bed to bed, shower to shower and stall to stall and the dorms empty, sleepy-eyed, hungover and bleary kids—the good, the bad and the ugly—as soon as they get close to the gates of the college, they’re stunned, they’re sobbing, because this is a place where you know, or sort of know, lots of people, two murders touch everyone, and the morning looks different from the morning that was supposed to be, it’s blurrier and more shadowed, that kind of hazy change, and now some students have gotten into the steeple of the church, less than fifty yards from where the bodies are being slipped into zip-up bags and the Dean of Students is going into his office to make a pair of phone calls and the cops are telling everyone to go home, it’s all over here, and the Dean of Students’ phone calls are just two of hundreds that come in and out of town all morning, and add to this those students up at the church, where a student club plays regularly, the chapel chimesters, not just for Sunday services but on Commencement, joyfully ringing, ringing, ringing, and Friday afternoon, clunking away at hard-to-recognize standards like Hooked on a Feeling and Three Times a Lady and Alone Again, Naturally, but now they’re just up there pounding away without rhyme or reason, the bells are screaming, and it won’t be long now before the jogger woman, showered and dressed, has her station wagon backed up to the door of her daughter’s dormitory, moving out her clothes, her books, her mini-refrigerator and stereo and now, an Amish buggy comes up the hill, negotiates its way around the vehicles, this mess of lights and sirens, and a couple of dark-dressed heavy-bodied women start unpacking pies and quilts for sale, not knowing how the world has changed.
That night, the college’s main meeting hall was jammed and Caroline needed to identify herself as provost or we’d have been diverted to the fieldhouse, where what proceeded here would be projected. The balcony and main floor were full, students sat in aisles, and no one worried about fire laws. I’d seen full houses before—Jane Smiley, Naomi Wolf—but nothing like this. Those others were celebrations of celebrity, high-priced whistlestops. This was a funeral. All day long, the campus had been a Woodstock of grieving, students standing in circles, silent, students hugging each other, sobbing. Youth was privileged, college kids more privileged than most, so they fell apart when death crashed the party.
Caroline and I got seats in front—vacated, grudgingly, by students—but then Warren Niles spotted her. I saw him first, motioning her towards the stage, already bathed in hot camera light. Caroline didn’t notice, she was looking around the auditorium, as if she were counting the house, which was standing room only.
“The president wants you,” I said.
“Oh, shit,” she said. My wife left, her seat immediately occupied by a short, bald, heavy-set man, the kind who can turn an airplane flight into a torture exercise.
“Hi,” he said. “You a professor?”
“Yes,” I said, unencouragingly.
“Well, what do you profess?”
“American literature. Fiction writing.”
“Hey! You’re the man. We should talk...”
“They’re starting up there,” I said. Someone was moving towards the podium. Dean of Students Herb Sullivan.
“There will be other occasions,” he said, “a memorial service. But I think we should begin with a minute of silence.” There’s something about a crowded hall going silent that’s like a suspension of life because life is noise and now all we had was some coughing and sobbing. I studied Caroline. She dressed up the stage, even though she didn’t want to be there. She reverently lowered her gaze but, as the silence lengthened, she looked around, right into the camera, tears in her eyes.
“Moment of silence,” my neighbor whispered. “He should have said moment. He said minute. A minute is sixty seconds.”
I turned away from him. People were noticing. His whisper carried. Did Warren Niles peek my way? I was on plenty of shit lists already. I didn’t need this.
“Thank you,” Dean Sullivan said.
“Forty-five seconds,” my neighbor remarked. “It felt like forever.”
“Do you mind?” I said, louder than I should have. People heard me. To make it worse, the guy looked at me and shrugged as if, go figure, I was the source of all the noise.
“Some of you may not know me. I’m Herb Sullivan, Dean of Students. Behind me are our President, Warren Niles...”
Normally, Warren shone at public occasions. He had a trademark smile, congenial and conspiratorial, he combined gravity and mockery, he wore his authority nonchalantly, like an out-of-style sports coat that was too comfortable to discard. But not tonight.
“...and Provost Caroline Ives. And Special Agent Sherwood Graves of the Bureau of Criminal Investigation and Identification.”
Graves was an odd one, no doubt about it. A bean pole of a man, you’d think his name was Ichabod, all bones and angles, looking dead pan at the audience of scared kids, worried parents, up-in-arms faculty. He was all business. The college didn’t expect much of him. I knew that from Caroline. The Martha Yeats case hadn’t gone anywhere and the College hoped Graves would leave before they had to complain. But now the question was moot. The spooky geek from Columbus was going to be with us a while longer.
“This is a sad day,” Dean Sullivan continued. “This morning two students were murdered at the gates of the college. Amy Plimpton and Jarrett Stark. Funeral arrangements are incomplete. As details become known, I’ll circulate them. Tonight’s meeting is to inform you about what has happened, what is planned and how the college will protect itself in days ahead. Mr. Graves will speak first. To be followed by me and by President Niles. Then, we’ll answer questions. But please remember, there are limits to what any of us can say, at this early point. Mr. Graves?”
Sherwood Graves leaned down into the microphone, not bothering to adjust it. It was as if he didn’t expect to be speaking much.
“Evening,” he said. Give him that much. He knew better than to say good. He reviewed what had happened, the death of Martha Yeats, still under investigation, and the death of two students that morning, also being investigated. After that, it was all boilerplate: how the full strength of state, county, village and college would be brought to bear until these crimes were solved and the college could return to what he called “normalcy.” “Underwhelming,” my neighbor said. I couldn’t disagree. Did Graves go out of his way to be this dull or did it happen naturally?
Dean Sullivan returned with a list of measures the college was taking—cops patrolling, hot-line for suspicious activity, call any time, operators on duty, students marching in groups at night, escorted walks from library to the dormitory and a virtual ban on activities off the hill. No walks down to the river, no jogging on country roads, no hitchhiking, no fraternity initiations, no midnight runs for food in town. It amounted to a stage of siege, a declaration of martial law, the college contracting, folding in on itself. The question hung in the air, though Dean Sullivan didn’t touch it, whether a college that operated like that should operate at all. Then it was Warren Niles’ turn.
“This day,” he said, “has been a nightmare.” He reminded me of an ex-head-of-state, overthrown and brought before a peoples’ court, disoriented, bedraggled. Shrunken. “Martha Yeats’ death was appalling. But this—the death of a student—of two students—goes beyond that, beyond everything that we have experienced, beyond our worst fears. Our community, our college has been violated. What now? What is to be done?”
The old Warren would have shifted gears then. He’d have a way of saying, yes, there’s a problem but we’re on our way to solve it. Trust us. Trust me. You might disagree with this or that individual decision but we’re doing something. Now he stood there as if he were searching for answers.
“I can’t tell you what to do,” he admitted. He sounded plaintive. “I don’t have that power over you. I don’t want it. But I can tell you what I wish. What I hope for. We are b
eing tested, very cruelly. If some of you choose not to take that test, to absent yourself, I would understand. I would accept that. I would hate it. I wouldn’t hate you but I would hate it. As I would hate to see a college broken and humbled...everything suspended...our very integrity...”
He faltered then, turning away from the audience, away from the cameras, brushing away tears I guessed. Anyway, it gave me goosebumps.
“He’s good. I heard he was a hambone.” My next-seat neighbor again.
“Listen,” I said. I leaned over. “Shut...the...fuck...up. Have I said anything you don’t understand?”
“Jeez, Professor May,” he said. “You’re touchy.” It startled me, that he knew my name but before I could follow up, Warren was back speaking.
“Integrity...” Warren said. “Integrity... integrity... integrity.” Chanted like a mantra. Was he losing it in front of us? Would someone lead him offstage? “Integer...to see an integer become a cipher...zero, nothing...is more than I can bear. I suggest we proceed. All of us together. Faculty, students, administration, community. That we endure. Not endure. Prevail...”
“Isn’t that from Faulkner?” my neighbor conjectured. “Nobel Prize speech?”
“...that we accommodate the severe but necessary rules that Dean Sullivan has just outlined. That, just as we have gathered to learn together, we gather together for protection. And that we continue as a college. That’s my suggestion. That we go about our business, not in spite of what has happened but because of it. That is my wish. The other choice is death, for this college. I choose life. Thank you...”
