The Puzzled Heart (12 page)

B
UT
the next day, someone appeared with an idea for the second act.

Reed had called from the office to say he was bringing someone home for a drink, someone who had an idea about the kidnapping. (Kate noticed that he always referred to it as
the
kidnapping, not
my
kidnapping, recognizing that it was as much hers as his.) The someone was named Emma Wentworth, and more would be explained when they met.

Emma Wentworth was the sort of woman whom Kate took to on sight. She had often tried to detail for herself this instant liking and had failed dismally. Or, put more sensibly, she had often come to like, indeed to cherish, women who did
not
make this kind of first
impression. First impressions were notoriously deceptive. Nonetheless, she warmed to Emma, who was large, not fat, but large, imposing in manner and body.

Emma was also at home in her body, an important factor, and had taken care with her appearance as though she knew how it would, and should, represent her. She wore a dress, fitted on top and at the waist, but with a full skirt, a dress that said: I’m wearing a dress, but I am not wearing a power suit. I have a decent figure for a large woman, but no desire to flaunt my legs nor to worry about where they are when I sit. I am intelligent, competent, reliable, and funny.… Can a first impression have conveyed all that? Well, of course, Reed had brought her home, which said something, and had introduced her as a professor, visiting at Reed’s law school this semester.

Emma accepted a Scotch, yet another confirmation of Kate’s instinctive liking, and began talking. “Reed has told me about his adventure—in fact he has told everybody, who told everybody else, in the hope of stirring up some answers. I said Reed’s adventure, but the adventure was, in fact, yours, which I consider a vital point. One of my students, having heard the story—somewhat embellished, as I subsequently learned, in the retelling—passed it on to me. I dropped in on Reed because I thought I might be able to help you, not with any particulars, but with what I have learned after study of these right-wing groups, how they operate, and how they can be differentiated one from the other. Reed cut me off at the
start of my disquisition and suggested that I tell my theories to you too.”

“I gave Emma the whole story, including the sordid details,” Reed said. “I thought we could use some advice about those we were trying to flush out, and she might as well know it all.”

Kate nodded.

“I’ve been studying right-wing groups,” Emma said, “their motivations and their differences. One of the points we liberals miss is that those on the right agree when it comes to all modern forms of art—whether literature, entertainment, or even music—they all agree that its influence is debilitating, probably evil. As Wendy Steiner has put it”—she opened her notebook—“ ‘for the opponents of the liberal academy, complexity and ambiguity are merely mystifications, and contemporary art in fact compounds social disorder. The world’s ills should be overcome instead by the enforcement of hierarchies and systems inherited from the past, with art’—and of course literature—‘fulfilling its social mission by bolstering and justifying these systems.’
*
I keep those sentences around to quote, because they sum up neatly the bottom line for those on the far right.”

“William Bennett, Allan Bloom, and Jesse Helms, in short,” Kate said.

“Well, yes, as far as their ideas go, if one can accuse
Jesse Helms of having anything describable as an idea. But my point to Reed and to you is that however much these right-wing people agree, their actions on behalf of their beliefs are quite distinct. While they would all, for example, like to have laws passed forbidding the kinds of art and teaching of modern ideas and concepts that undermine what they consider the fundamental values, they fight the likes of you and me, and everyone from those seeking abortions to the National Endowment for the Arts (which they have largely succeeded in eviscerating) in different ways. Much as we would all like to think so, the fact is that relatively few of those on the far right, outside of the militias and, I am tempted to say, those in politics or running for office, condone violent acts or acts such as those committed against Reed.”

“What about those committed against Kate?” Reed asked.

“That’s what is interesting. As far as I can discern, feeling against liberal academics runs pretty high, but to kidnap a woman’s husband doesn’t ring true to me as a neoconservative move given all the facts of this case. And I assume I have been given all the facts of the case?”

Kate looked at Reed, who nodded. “All of them,” he said.

“Are you saying,” Kate asked, amazement in her voice, “that they will murder a doctor who performs abortions, or organize militias to protect their property
from the government, but they wouldn’t set Reed or me up in the way that they did? One is acceptable, the other isn’t?”

“It’s not quite like that. Let’s leave the militia groups out of this. They are mostly in the West or Midwest and couldn’t possibly be directly involved in this sort of academic maneuver. Remember also, Kate, that those who commit murders—and that includes assassinations—are mentally ill fanatics whom those who wish to have a particular murder committed enlist for their purpose. Ray, Oswald, Sirhan Sirhan—these were all unbalanced fanatics egged on to their murderous acts. They weren’t charter members of right-wing groups.”

“All right, I’ll give you that for the moment,” Kate said. “Where does that leave us?”

Emma smiled. “I see you want me to skip the explanations and the political analysis and cut to the chase, as they say.”

“Well,” Kate said, “I suppose that’s true, though I do find all you have to say intensely interesting. I hope you’ll give us a chance in the future to learn more about your work; I mean that. It’s just that, at the moment, I’m rather egotistically tense about our own situation. I don’t want to think of Reed’s being kidnapped all over again.”

Reed took Kate’s hand and spoke to Emma: “I suspect we’re overeager to get to the bottom of this mess and clear it up, if we can. I’m sure Kate didn’t mean
to sound ungrateful to you for helping us, and I assure you that if she says she’s interested in what you have learned and that she wants to know more about it, that is the simple truth.”

“Point taken,” Emma said. “No offense in the world. On to the chase.” She put her notebook back into her bag, and seemed to pause a moment to collect her thoughts.

“Here’s how I see it,” she said. “You have two groups of people involved in the kidnapping. The lesser in importance are the students, both the boys who carried out the kidnapping of Reed, and the girls who kept him in their apartment and played their sexual games.”

“But what about the boy who wrote the antifeminist letter to the college newspaper, and whose mother is a right-wing leader?” Reed asked.

“That’s probably how the student group got involved. I rather doubt the mother of this boy had much to do with it. I could be wrong—keep in mind that mine are only guesses, though educated guesses—but I’ll wager the mother, however intolerant of your sort of person, did not know of this plan.”

“Harriet has been getting acquainted with her,” Kate said. “She’ll probably be able to find out if you are right. I’m pretty sure Harriet wouldn’t have mentioned the whole kidnapping bit to the mother because she, Harriet, was pretending to be right-wing herself, and wouldn’t have had any way to know about it.”

“I’ll be interested to hear her report,” Emma said.

“And the second group?” Reed asked.

“Right-wing,” Emma said, “but in my opinion, not a group of right-wingers, but an ultraconservative academic who has it in for Kate—therefore in all likelihood a member of Kate’s English department. It could be someone in another department or in the administration, but I consider that unlikely. Whoever was behind this had to be near enough to Kate on a more or less daily basis to monitor her.”

“Are you sure?” Kate said. “I mean—”

“No, I’m not sure. I may be miles off the mark, and this whole thing may have been planned by a militia group that has set up quarters in Central Park, or in some New York apartment. But none of this smells like right-wing group activity, except for the students—and they only in their motives, not in their actions, which were, I think, directed by someone else, and that someone a professor. After all, the boys and girls involved are all students.”

Reed and Kate looked as though they might need a week at the very least to digest this.

“And if you’re right, how do we find out which professor it is?” Reed asked.

“Ah,” said Emma, “there you are on your own. I’m willing to bet a goodly sum that whoever he or she is is in Kate’s department. But I don’t know the cast of characters well enough, indeed at all, to even hazard a guess—except for this. Whoever it is dislikes Kate intensely, and probably not for personal reasons,
not, that is, because you’ve done him or her some direct personal damage, but because by your presence in the department and your teaching of literature, you profoundly threaten what this individual holds dear, just as you threaten Bill Buckley and William Bennett and their political think-alikes. I’d suggest you begin by getting a list of the tenured members of your department—it may be someone without tenure, but I doubt such a person would take the risk, and anyway, we have to narrow the field at first. It can always be enlarged if necessary.”

“Ours is a large department,” Kate muttered in the tones of one announcing that Texas was a large state. “There must be at least thirty tenured professors. How do we know it wasn’t a lawyer colleague of Reed’s?”

“We don’t.” Emma was clearly trying to be patient. “If everything I’ve suggested turns out to be wrong, we start over. As I say, we have to start somewhere. And absent some vital bit of information that might result from your widespread storytelling, all my experience tells me to start with the English department.”

The three of them sat in silence. After a few minutes, when neither Kate nor Reed spoke, Emma rose to her feet: “I’ll be off then. Think about what I’ve said. It won’t hurt to make a list of the tenured professors in the English department, and add a few details: who’s on leave, is a known left-winger, was having a baby or an operation in the past weeks or months—all that sort of thing. Then, if you know
anything of their ideas from their books, you might consider those with care. Do you happen to have an ardent Freudian among your colleagues?”

Kate stared at her. “Yes, we do. But why on earth …?”

“I’m just being silly now,” Emma said. “Pay no attention.”

“I used to be silly,” Kate remarked. “It’s amazing how these Christian bigots can knock the silliness out of you. Why a Freudian?”

“Well, he went after Reed, didn’t he? The woman, even if she is the enemy, isn’t worthy of combat because she hasn’t got a you-know-what, which is the absolute signifier.”

If she had meant to make them laugh, she succeeded. Still chuckling, they walked her to the door. “Keep in touch,” Emma said.

“By now I’m ready to suspect everybody,” Kate said to Reed as they went back to the living room and poured themselves another drink. “For starters, what do you really know about Emma Wentworth?”

“I didn’t just meet her today, you know,” Reed said. “I’m on the committee that voted to invite her for a visiting professorship, so while I haven’t known her personally for long, I certainly know her record and her reputation. Both are mighty impressive. She’s known as an authority on right-wing groups, the organizations and funding that support them, and the
legal possibilities of preventing some of their effects. Not,” Reed added, “that there are many of those.”

“Now that you mention it,” Kate said, “I’ve always wondered why no one stops all those church groups, who do not pay taxes because they are religious, from busing their people to take part in political actions. Why doesn’t someone stop that? If you’re tax exempt, you can’t be political, no?”

“Yes. But even the more liberal churches would fight any such action. They don’t want their tax exempt status even to come up for questioning.”

“I might have known. But Reed, do you really think it’s likely to be a member of the English department? I know some of them are a little autocratic, and some of them are conservative to a degree, but I didn’t think any of them were committed to the religious right. After all, this isn’t South Carolina.”

“You may find that some of your colleagues wish it were.”

Kate was still uncertain about how to discover the political views of her colleagues, something she had never thought to question, at least not lately. She remembered that most of them, at least those who had touched on the matter at all, loathed Nixon and thought Ronald Reagan was a joke, a man who thought he had fought in World War II because he had made movies about it. Lately, however, politics within the department had been so fraught that national politics didn’t seem to come up. At least, whenever
she had lunch with a colleague, it was always gossip—about their department or people at other universities. Kate was continually astonished at how much some of her male colleagues knew about the personal lives of English professors from distant departments, and she had to admit she found the gossip amusing. But politics? They never seemed to gossip about that.

But then, the very next day, as she was leaving the campus, a professor she had never known well accosted her and demanded conversation. Nathan Rosen mainly taught undergraduates, at which he was reputed to be highly successful, particularly in survey courses, a realm of teaching Kate found, after her apprentice years, to be superficial and maddeningly repetitive. Her guilty dislike of these courses caused her to have great respect for those who agreed to undertake them year after year and did them well.

“Shall we get a cup of coffee?” Kate asked.

“I don’t much like the restaurants around here,” Nathan said. “I’m kosher.” Almost inadvertently Kate looked up at his head. He was not wearing a yarmulke. He intercepted her glance. “I only wear it when I eat, and at certain other times,” he said. “Not here. But I wanted to talk to you about a student who does wear his all the time. Could we go to my office?”