The Douglas Kennedy Collection #2

by Douglas Kennedy

  The next morning, after breakfast and the usual sunset beach hike, I climbed into my car and drove into Halifax. My first port of call was an internet café on the Spring Garden Road. My email inbox was pretty damn empty—a three-line communiqué from my mother: “I do hope you have stopped holding a grudge against me. You seem to fly off the handle at everything I say. I would appreciate a call . . .” Not likely. A reassuring email from Dwight Hale: “The Bureau does not seem interested in questioning you any further about your time at Freedom Mutual, so return home whenever you feel like it.” A fast hello from Christy: “What’s with the disappearing act? A word or two about your whereabouts and well-being would be appreciated.” And the following from the Harvard Placement Office:

  Dear Ms. Howard

  We notice that you have recently reregistered with us as a candidate for an academic posting. Could you please call us as soon as possible to discuss a position that has just opened at the last minute in the English department at New England State University.

  Sincerely yours,

  Margaret Noonan

  I gnawed on my lip when I read the words New England State University, as it was a third-tier place, favored by the sort of kids who either goofed off entirely in high school and/or were determined to do so in college. But . . . it was a job opening. Despite all that money in the bank, I kept telling myself I needed a job, which is why I had sent an email to Harvard a week earlier, saying I was in the market for an academic post. Because how could I do anything risky like take a year off to live in Paris—or bum my way around South America—when a job at a minor-league university (albeit in Boston) was up for grabs?

  Sitting there in that internet café on a gray morning in Halifax I could see, laid out in front of me, the course of action I shouldn’t take: making the call to Margaret Noonan, arriving back in Boston, doing the interview, starting straightaway as a full-time professor, and repenting at leisure for having steered myself into a professional cul-de-sac.

  Don’t make that phone call to Harvard, I told myself in that Halifax café. But I made the call. And I got the job. And as I accepted the job, I thought: The lure of safety drags us into lives we’d prefer to dodge.

  EIGHT

  MY OFFICE AT New England State University was in the basement of a dull concrete building. It was around eight by nine feet and had one half-window that was always streaked with dirt. Whatever low-level natural light entered the office was therefore always refracted through a prism of smudged glass. When it snowed—and it snowed a lot in Boston that winter—the window disappeared, and I was reduced to making do with the fluorescent tubes that provided most of the interior light.

  “I’m afraid the new member of the department always gets the Black Hole,” Daniel Sanders told me after offering me the job.

  The job was an assistant professorship in English. It had fallen open when its previous holder—a specialist in early twentieth-century American literature named Deborah Holder—had died of a fast-acting stomach cancer that had killed her just three months after its initial diagnosis.

  “Debbie was genuinely loved by everyone in the department,” Sanders told me during our postinterview lunch. “She was just thirty-one, married with a young son, hugely popular with her students, and someone who genuinely had a major academic future ahead of her. She was a star—and nice on top of it. I am probably being very impolitic here by telling you all this, but I’d rather you be aware of the size of the shoes you are about to fill than find out through all the usual interdepartmental whispers just how loved she was.”

  “I appreciate your directness.”

  “That’s my style. That’s why I’m also going to be very direct with you right now about several other things. As you know this is a tenure-track job. But you definitely won’t be granted tenure unless you get a book published within the next four years—and with a reasonably high-level academic press. So you really must get the book between hard covers as quickly as possible.

  “The second thing I have to tell you is this: everyone in this department knows that you were romantically involved with David Henry.”

  “I see,” I finally said, telling myself that I was a fool to think that nobody at New England would have been tipped off about this most gossip-worthy part of my past history.

  “I am not telling you this to make you feel uncomfortable, nor to pass any judgment on you. You should know that, in the course of the assessment process, I did speak to Professor Hawthorden at Harvard. He only had excellent things to say about you—but I did ask him directly if your involvement with David Henry caused problems for him or other members of the department. He informed me that you were very discreet about it.”

  “It’s in the past, Professor,” I said, interrupting him. “And I hope I will not be defined within this department by something that was very private, that was never discussed with anyone, and that had no bearing whatsoever on my doctoral thesis—”

  “Which was considered a first-rate piece of work,” he said, completing the sentence. “I wouldn’t be offering you this job if I didn’t know that, or if I wasn’t also aware that you consider this ‘relationship’ now historical and not to be repeated in the future.”

  “What happened with Professor Henry would never be repeated again, sir.”

  Yet again I was finding out one of the most fundamental rules of life: the repercussions of the past always rumble underneath everything. If you’re lucky the rumblings are only heard by yourself in that most private of realms, your conscience. But if your private life tips into the public domain, you will always be reminded of its shadow and the suspicions it tosses up about you.

  Professor Sanders decided that my assurances were worth the gamble. Once I offered them, he told me I had the job—as long as I could start four days from now on Monday.

  “No problem, but I do need to see everything that Professor Holder was lecturing on.”

  That afternoon I was ushered into Deborah Holder’s office. It looked as though it was still fully occupied. Standing in the doorway with Professor Sanders I took in its crammed bookcases and noticed what seemed to be first editions of Emily Dickinson and Sinclair Lewis, stacks of papers, a framed poster of the Paris Métro system, and a bulletin board crammed with photographs. They were all family pictures. Deborah Holder had been a pretty woman with pulled-back black hair and an easy smile. Judging from the photos her sartorial style was Shetland sweaters and blue jeans, as was that of the bearded thirty-something man who shared so many of the photographs with her. Then there was her little boy, seen in these pictures at various stages of early development, the last of these showing him around the age of four, his arms draped around a mother now drawn and pale, her hairless head partly covered by a scarf.

  I took in all the incidental office details. Everything here hinted at a life still in full swing. It was as if Deborah Holder had just stepped away from it all for a few minutes and fully expected to return to it at any moment. Professor Sanders must have been reading my thoughts as he said: “She’d checked herself out of Mass General after the last course of chemotherapy, insisting that she was well enough to teach. As it turned out, she’d only left the hospital when she was told there was nothing more they could do for her. But she was determined to go back to her students and kept the diagnosis from everyone.

  “Now, we could have her husband clear everything out of here for you, I suppose, if you really didn’t want to work in the Black Hole . . . That office is not as spacious. In fact, it’s downright poky. But—”

  “I’ll take it.”

  Sanders nodded his approval, then motioned me to follow him out of there and into his own office. It was a large room with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, a venerable oak desk, framed Hogarth prints of eighteenth-century London (his area of expertise was Swift and his contemporaries), a worn Persian rug covering the institutional linoleum on the floor. He motioned for me to take the wing chair that fronted his desk.

  “I don’t know
about you, but I could definitely use a stiff whiskey. Going into Deborah’s office . . .”

  He let the sentence drop.

  “I wouldn’t say no to one,” I told him.

  Sanders opened a filing cabinet and pulled out a bottle of Teacher’s and two glasses.

  “Very Philip Marlowe, n’est-ce pas?” he said, pouring me two fingers.

  “I didn’t know Raymond Chandler was one of your specialties,” I said, accepting the glass.

  “He isn’t. I made the mistake of getting locked into the epoch of George the Third,” he said. “At least you are dealing with something more concrete, more recent, more about what we grapple with in this country.”

  “Does everything have to have immediate contemporary relevance?” I asked, clinking glasses with him.

  “According to the philistinic fools who sit on the board of this university . . . well, they don’t see any point in finding additional funding for the humanities, let alone those that address times past. But, sorry, I’m starting to rant.”

  “There’s nothing to apologize about. Your anger sounds very justified.”

  “You went to Smith and Harvard, so you must understand that your undergraduate students at New England State will largely have been C students in high school, and will not dazzle you with their insights into Sister Carrie. Having said that, given the insane competition for places in the Ivy League and the better liberal-arts colleges, we are getting a somewhat improved level of undergraduate—by which I mean uninspired, but not altogether stupid—and I think I’m starting to rant again . . .”

  He opened a desk drawer and pulled out three hefty files.

  “Here are Debbie Holder’s lecture notes. You are going to have quite a long weekend ahead of you if you want to be ready to face your students Monday morning.”

  He was completely right about that. I went straight home after the meeting and spent the following two days burrowing into Professor Holder’s lectures. Part of me felt like a poacher as I was reading through these notes to discover the shape of her courses and the take she had on the Naturalists and Dickinson. There were times when I vehemently disagreed with her—especially when she tried to discern leitmotifs in Dreiser. But her analyses of Dickinson’s internal metric rhythms—and the metaphysic of her poetry—hugely impressed me. The passion she had for the work she was discussing was both remarkable and intimidating. I couldn’t help but feel that she was several cognitive notches above me; a true natural when it came to engaging with the flow of literary ideas. Of course I felt a stab of envy—but it was the sort of envy that arises out of seeing someone in your field raising their game and playing at a higher level. Reading her notes was both sobering and sad because, by the end of the weekend, I realized just what a major loss Deborah Holder had been.

  When I returned to New England State early Monday morning I was in an advanced state of anxiety. My first day as a professor—and as I strode into the classroom, a firm smile on my face, a voice in my head kept telling me: They’re all thinking, “You’re not Deborah Holder.”

  The first class was a course in American Originals, encompassing new movements in twentieth-century American poetry from Ezra Pound to Allen Ginsberg. According to her notes, Deborah Holder was about to start discussing Wallace Steven’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” When I reached the combined desk and lectern at the front of the hall, I found myself staring at seventeen students (I’d made a point of learning all their names over the weekend). They all looked bored, half awake, wishing to be anywhere but here. I wrote my name on the blackboard, and under that my office hours and the number of my telephone extension. As I scrawled this information across the board I could feel my clammy fingers failing to gain purchase on the chalk.

  This was stage fright. Like all such manic jitters, it was bound up in that most commonplace of horrors: being found out. More than anything this dread permeates so much of adult life: the very private belief that a few ill-chosen words will show the world what a total fraud you know yourself to be.

  As I finished writing my extension number, I shut my eyes for a nanosecond and told myself that the show must go on. Then I turned around and faced the class.

  “OK,” I said, “let’s make a start.”

  I took another fast steadying breath. I started to talk—a long exhalation which lasted for the next hour and during which the self-doubt was replaced by an ever-growing sense that I was pulling this off. After explaining my awkwardness about taking over Professor Holder’s classes—and my realization that I would be replacing someone who was irreplaceable—I started speaking about “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” and how, as the title implied, the poem dealt with a simultaneously simplex and complex idea.

  “How you interpret all that arrives in life determines so much about how the narrative of your life is dictated. Perception is everything. We choose to see the world in a certain way. This perception can—and most certainly does—change as we grow older. But we are always conscious of the fact that, as Stevens so lucidly notes, there are thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird—and that, like so many things outside the range of empiricism, there is no one defining point of view. Like everything in life, it’s all subjective.”

  I sensed I lost them a little bit with the reference to empiricism, but I was still pleased overall with this first outing and did seem to have engaged them . . . for a moment or two anyway.

  The class in American Naturalism was a little shakier. It had over seventy students, many of whom seemed to be members of the jock brigade and had chosen it as a means of getting one of their English requirements out of the way. The football players—loud, show-off types—sat together in a pack and made a point of whispering loudly as I lectured, slipping notes back and forth and generally trumpeting their team-player ignorance for all to see. Interspersed among them were several cheerleader types, the sort of blond, clean-limbed women who all had names like Babs and Bobbi, probably came from white-bread suburbs, and would end up marrying the same sort of blocky men who were now showing off to them at my expense.

  I was trying to talk about the trial scene in An American Tragedy where Clyde admits to “thinking” about killing his pregnant girlfriend, and how Dreiser plays with notions of culpability and the way we all want to confess something, even if it means orchestrating our own self-destruction. But as I was warming to this theme, the biggest and blockiest of the football clique turned around and started chatting loudly with one of the giggly cheerleaders. I stumbled over a sentence and then snapped.

  “You . . .” I said.

  The guy continued talking.

  “You . . .” I said again.

  The guy ignored me.

  I threw down my pen and stormed right up the aisle to where he was talking. He kept chatting to the bimbette.

  “You . . .”

  He finally looked at me.

  “You want something?” he asked.

  “What’s your name?”

  “What’s it to you?”

  “This is my course, my classroom, and you are behaving in a rude, disruptive manner.”

  He turned to his jocky cohorts and pulled a face—one that essentially said: Do you believe this nobody? My rage turned cold.

  “Your name.”

  He continued to pull a face. That’s when I slammed a fist on his desk.

  “Your name now.”

  There was shocked silence as Mr. Football realized that he had just crossed that line of scrimmage marked Danger Zone.

  “Michaels,” he finally said.

  “Well, Mr. Michaels, gather up your things and get out. You’re now officially on Dean’s Report.”

  He looked wide-eyed at me.

  “You can’t do that,” he said, suddenly little-boyish.

  “Oh, yes, I can. You’re on Dean’s Report and you’re to leave this classroom now.”

  “But if you put me on Dean’s Report—”

  “It’s not an ‘if,’ Mr. Michaels. Y
ou’re there already.”

  I turned and walked back to the lectern. Michaels didn’t move, but he did look to his pack for support. Everyone was suddenly averting their eyes from his and generally zoning him out.

  “We are all waiting for you to go, Mr. Michaels,” I said. “Or do I have to call security—a call that will result in your immediate suspension from this university.”

  Another long silence. Michaels again looked to his cohorts, beseeching them to back him up here. But they all stared down at their desks.

  “Mr. Michaels, I am not going to say this again. There is the door. Use it.”

  His face was now full of rage. He grabbed his books and his backpack and stormed out, slamming the door behind him. I let the silence in the classroom hold for a good fifteen seconds. Then, in as mild a voice as possible, I asked: “Now where were we?”

  And I resumed the lecture.

  After class I returned to my office and typed up a Dean’s Report that detailed the event in the classroom and the reason why Michaels was evicted. A Dean’s Report was a reasonably big deal at New England State. I had read about it in the hefty Faculty Rules book that I had received from Professor Sanders last week and noted that it was “only to be used when a student breaches all rules of classroom etiquette and/or engages in actions that are disruptive and detrimental.” I read this statement again before writing up the report and actually incorporated it into my comments on Mr. Michaels’s rude and ignorant behavior. Then I sent one copy to Alma Carew, the dean of students, and another to Professor Sanders. An hour after I had dropped them off, Sanders was knocking on the door of my office.

  “You’ve had an eventful first day,” he said.

  “I’m not going to be bullied by a student, Professor.”

  “Word has it that you engaged in an act of physical force.”

  “Did Michaels tell you that?”

  “No, Michaels told his coach that. Just as he also told his coach that he was on Dean’s Report for the second time this term, which means an automatic suspension until next autumn.”