Quoth the Raven (3 page)

“Unless you know something I don’t know, they’re not doing it together. Lighten up, Chessey. Go pat Susan Ledovic on the head. She’s dying for your attention.”

“Mmm,” Chessey said. Evie had gone back to her clipboard, and Chessey could see Susan Ledovic, the fat girl with the pimples, ripping out a seam with the thread in her teeth. Evie was right. It was time to stop fretting over what she could do nothing about, and go back to being the Perfect College Coed instead.

What nagged at her, though, was that she did know something Evie didn’t know. She knew that Jack had intended to see Dr. Steele today, and have it out once and for all.

D
R. KATIIERINE BRANCH SOMETIMES
wondered what would have happened to her if she had been brought up in another time, or another country. When she was a child, she had read a roomful of books on Great Women Pioneers—Elizabeth Blackwell, Maria Mitchell, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Marie Curie—but she had known immediately that she was nothing like them. Stuck in a situation that offered her any kind of real resistance, she would yield. By the time she was seven, she had yielded on a number of important issues, including Leggings, Lavelieres, and Sean Cassidy. If she found the strength to defy her hyperconventional, hypercritical, chillingly emotionless mother, it was only because she was desperate not to defy that small group of girls who represented Everything That Mattered at John F. Kennedy Memorial Elementary. Katherine Branch had always had a very fine eye for distinctions of status and a consuming passion of shame at the fact that she had been born worthy of belonging to none of the first-class categories offered for her inspection. She had figured out early that Women Didn’t Count, and that all the things women did—nursing, teaching, raising a family—were irretrievably second-rate. She had figured out even earlier that, among women, being pretty was not enough, unless you had something else to back it up. Katherine had always been pretty enough, but the other things—wit, maybe, or that school-skewed form of intelligence that is so important in grades K-6—eluded her. She was a fairly attractive, moderately bright, nondescriptly pleasant child of the early sixties. From the day she started kindergarten to the day she graduated from high school, she was destined to fade into the woodwork.

At the moment, she looked like anything but part of the woodwork. Her red hair fell down over her back in a cascade of body-permed curls. Her bright orange sweater, chosen deliberately for shock and contrast, reached nearly to her knees, not quite hiding the black stretch pants she was wearing under it. Also under the sweater was a bright white, 100 percent cotton turtleneck, meant to save the skin of her chest from the scratch of ramie and wool. Ever since Katherine Branch had committed herself to wearing only natural fibers, she had had a great deal of trouble with chafing and rash.

She caught sight of her reflection in the side of her toaster, made a face at it, and walked on past, to that small stretch of her cramped kitchen counter where she kept the instant coffee. Behind her, at the tiny round table, Vivi Wollman was sitting over a plate of Betty Crocker carrot cake and staring out the square kitchen window at the quad. Vivi Wollman was Katherine’s best friend at Independence College and the only other person who really hated the fuss that got made around her about Halloween. Vivi had even been an ally in Katherine’s one attempt to put a stop to it all, that year that Katherine had called the Pennsylvania EPA and reported the bonfire as a “pollution hazard.” Unfortunately, that foray into common sense and political correctness hadn’t turned out the way Katherine expected. The bonfire was so famous, people simply couldn’t think rationally about it. The Governor had issued a proclamation blocking the EPA’s attempt to shut the bonfire down, the state legislature had passed a special law to allow Independence College to go on making bonfires until the final blast of Gabriel’s trumpet, and someone had sneaked her name out of the EPA’s files and given it to the press. It was a good thing she’d already had tenure, because if she hadn’t she would never have gotten it. For the next year, with the exception of Vivi, not a single person spoke to her—except to call her a bitch.

Katherine got the jar of instant coffee, took a couple of spoons out of the rack next to the sink, and headed back to the table. Because there was no way to avoid looking out the window at the quad, she was faced for a few seconds with a. sight that grated on her nerves: dozens of students, dressed up in ridiculous costumes, milling around among the greenery and playing seduction games. Katherine wondered if Alice Elkinson was out there, showing off her engagement ring, acting like a teenager instead of a woman old enough to know the score. Then she sat down.

“Crap,” she said, to the air rather than to Vivi. “I’m so rattled I can’t think straight. Do you have a cigarette?”

Vivi reached into her pocket and brought out a pack of Marlboro menthols. She was a small woman, dark and attractive enough except for the fact that she was oddly lumpy. A decade of weight-training and macrobiotic diets had twisted her out of shape. She got a blue Bic lighter from her other pocket and lit Catherine’s cigarette.

“I think you’re jumping the gun,” she said. “I mean, I think you’re panicking before you have to. After all, nothing has happened yet.”

“A lot has happened,” Katherine said. “This time last year, there was a Women’s Studies Department. This time this year, there isn’t.”

Vivi brushed this away. “That was our fault, not some plot on the part of the administration. We didn’t go about it right. At Berkeley—”

“This is
not
Berkeley.”

“I know it’s not Berkeley,” Vivi said patiently. “My point is, if you’re going to keep a department like Women’s Studies alive these days, you’ve got to have the numbers. You’ve got to have your classrooms full. The way to do that is with sex and spirituality—you know, self-actualization courses. Instead, we had all that stuff about women’s historiography and the sociology of housework in the Middle Ages, all this linear-logic, male-dominated crap—”

“Vivi.”
Katherine took a great drag on her cigarette, blew smoke into the air, and sighed. Sometimes, talking to Vivi gave her a headache. “The Faculty Senate would never have put up with the kind of thing you’re talking about. They barely put up with my witchcraft course and you know it. They’re so hyped on academic rigor.”

“They’re so hyped on male supremacy,” Vivi corrected. “We should have sidestepped them, Katherine. We should have offered a course like ‘Images of Women in the Art of the Renaissance’ and then done what we wanted with it. Talked about birth control in the sixteenth century. Run some consciousness-raising sessions. The word would have gotten around after a while.”

“Mary Gillman tried that two years ago,” Katherine pointed out. “She got fired.”

Vivi got that long-suffering look on her face, usually reserved for men. “Mary Gillman got fired because that stupid girl accused her of sexual harassment, and then the parents threatened to sue. That isn’t the point. The point is, I don’t see how all this ties in with Donegal Steele.”

Katherine looked at the tip of her cigarette, a red coal burning into the filter. She took the saucer out from under her cup and stubbed the butt out in it. “All right,” she said, “let’s do this as a sequence. Have you read Steele’s book?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Then you must know he isn’t a friend of ours. He thinks all the minority studies departments ought to be run off campus on a rail—I’m sorry. I’m making a mess of this. Anyway, he isn’t likely to be a big supporter of what we want to do.”

“What we
have
to do,” Vivi corrected.

“We’ll get to that later. The fact is, the administration didn’t even think about hiring him until old Yevers got sick, then they went crazy and offered him a ton of money and practically dragged him out here by the heels—don’t you ever wonder why he agreed to come?”

“Why shouldn’t he?”

“Why should he be bothered?” Katherine said. “He’s famous, after all. His book is a best-seller. He has all the money he wants. What are we except an obscure little liberal arts college in an even more obscure part of Pennsylvania?”

Vivi considered this. “We’ve got the best rated undergraduate major in American Studies in the country. Donegal Steele is a professor of American history.”

“He could have been a professor of history at Yale. Or at Harvard, for God’s sake—they’ll hire anything at Harvard as long as it gets its name in the newspapers. But Vivi, there’s one thing he couldn’t have gotten, at Harvard or at Yale or anywhere else but here.”

“What?”

“Power.”

Vivi Wollman threw up her hands. “For God’s sake, Katherine, will you listen to yourself? You’ve gone totally paranoid. Power to do what? You just said yourself this was nothing but an obscure liberal arts college—”

“First the administration forces him down the throats of all the rest of us as Chairman of the Program. Then they boot him upstairs as Dean of Studies. Then he gets to make policy.”

“So what?”

Katherine got another cigarette out of Vivi’s pack and lit up herself. She felt dizzy, the way she always did when she got scared. The air in front of her eyes looked like patterned mayonnaise.

“Vivi,” she said, “listen to me. Tenure is all very well and good, but all it does is ensure that you don’t get fired for cause without a hearing. Did you know that?”

Vivi looked confused.

“Back in the seventies,” Katherine went on, “when the student population was down and the colleges started losing money and had to cut back on staff, there was a case that went before the AAUP arbitration board. Some small college in Ohio or somewhere cut a third of its faculty jobs and pink-slipped a lot of tenured people as well as nontenured ones. And the AAUP—”

“Had a shit fit,” Vivi said confidently.

“Not exactly.” Katherine took a deep breath, her hundredth of the morning, her millionth since she’d first worked all this out—and that had been less than four days ago. “The AAUP decided that colleges had to be free to cut departments they could no longer afford to run, and cutting departments makes no sense without firing professors, tenured or not. Vivi, you and I are professors without a department.”

Vivi Wollman blanched. “Oh,” she said.
“Oh.”

“Exactly. If Donegal Steele gets what he wants—and he wants the highest administrative post he can lay hands on, trust me, I know the bastard—if he gets what he wants we’re both going to be out on our asses in less than a year. And you know what the job market is like.”

“But—”

“But nothing.” Katherine stood up, grabbed her cup and saucer, and threw them in the sink. The sink was full of dishes she never got around to doing and brightly colored sponges that seemed to appear out of nowhere. She picked up one of the sponges and tore it in half.

“It makes no sense for Donegal Steele to be here if the administration didn’t promise him at least a couple of significant promotions. It makes no sense for the administration to promise him a couple of significant promotions if their first concern isn’t getting rid of us. We’re being ambushed, Vivi. We’re being power-lunched right out of existence. If we don’t do something to stop it fast, we’re going to be up the brown creek without so much as a canoe.”

“Oh,
Katherine
.”

Katherine wasn’t listening. She had torn the sponge into shreds, and the ache in her head had turned into a ferocious pounding that felt like a jackhammer slamming against the walls of a decompression chamber.

“Oh, Christ,” she said, “I wish that nasty two-bit son-of-a-whore was dead.”

F
OR KEN CROCKETT, THE
problem with Dr. Katherine Branch was not that she was a woman, or a feminist, but that she made so much out of being a witch. He knew nobody believed that, but it was true. Even her name was a signal, the name of a woman who had been hanged for witchcraft in Puritan New England—not at Salem, but somewhere else. Ken didn’t remember the particulars. Like everyone else at Independence College, he had been treated to Katherine’s standard lecture on witchcraft in colonial America. Also like everyone else at Independence College, he hadn’t retained the details. Salem was just the tip of the iceberg. Five hundred people were hung as witches in New England between the founding of Plymouth Colony and the American Revolution. Whatever. Alice Elkinson, who knew more about American history than anyone Ken had ever met, said that Katherine’s research was not only lousy, but positively creative—but Ken didn’t care about that. He did care about his suspicion that Katherine Branch was not Katherine Branch’s real name. Unfortunately, he had never been able to prove it.

For Ken Crockett, the problem with Dr. Donegal Steele was entirely different. Ken would have had a hard time putting it into words he was willing to allow anyone else to hear. He had a hard time putting it into words he was willing to allow himself to hear. That was why he kept Steele’s book,
The Literacy Enigma
, out on the coffee table in his living room. Seeing it there that way focused him.

At the moment,
The Literacy Enigma
was covered with strips of black and orange crepe paper. The antique breakfront on the other side of the room, which had belonged to Ken’s mother, was covered with cardboard masks. The blue-and-green Persian rug Ken had bought in New York was covered with mud. The mess was making the small woman sitting in Ken’s mother’s blue-patterned wing chair look terribly uncomfortable, and Ken felt very guilty about that. The little woman was named Mrs. Winston Barradyne, and she had been of great help to Ken over the past fifteen years. Mrs. Winston Barradyne was the President—for life, Ken sometimes thought—of the Belleville, Pennsylvania, Historical Society.

“The problem,” Mrs. Winston Barradyne was saying, sipping at the cup of tea Ken had brought her while Ken paced around the room, wondering what he dared pick up, with Halloween only two days away and students rushing in and out to get what they needed to go on with their decorating, “is that I don’t know what the man
wants
. It’s the way I told you on the phone yesterday morning. We’re not exactly the National Aeronautics and Space Administration—”