The Collected Stories of Amanda Cross (19 page)

“Yes,” Luellen said, “I thought you’d want to know about me. That’s only natural. There was nothing whatever dramatic in my life until I got to college. Then I met a man, really the first man who ever paid serious attention to me, the first one who ever listened to what I had to say, and I married him just to have someone to listen to me. Only, after we were married …”

“He stopped listening,” Kate provided, after a pause.

“Yes. He thought I was the docile type. Well, I was the docile type, I guess, and he thought I’d be the kind of wife he wanted. But I insisted on finishing college and even said I was going on to graduate school. I loved literature.” She said it the way, in a long ago and more distant time, men used to say “I loved my country.” Now what made me think of that? Kate wondered.

“And then,” Kate added, “he left, you left. What came next?” For Luellen certainly seemed to need encouragement to continue her story.

“It was funny. When we were in college, we seemed to be equals. Then, once we were married, he was reading the newspaper or watching a ball game in the living room and I was in the kitchen. If you know what I mean?”

Kate nodded to show she knew.

“That’s all. I guess you’d have to say I left. I had inherited some money from my grandfather, just like Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa Harlowe”–she waited while Kate smiled her recognition of the similarity–“not that someone was threatening to rape me. Anyway, I enrolled in graduate school and–”

“Let’s go a little more slowly now,” Kate said. “Did you get to know many students there? Were there any special professors you admired?”

“Benjamin Franklin was my mentor,” she said. “I know it’s an awfully funny name to have, but he signs himself B. Franklin, and everyone calls him Frank.”

“I know who he is,” Kate said. “That is, I’ve heard of him, naturally. He’s a well-known critic of nineteenth-century novelists.
And
he’s done some important work on George Eliot.”

“Yes. I guess that’s why I decided to write my dissertation on her. But I never thought I’d find this play and be able to edit it for publication. I hope it will get me tenure. It should, don’t you think?”

“How close was your relationship with B. Franklin? And if you think I’m suggesting something untoward, I may be.”

“You don’t believe in sex between people who love each other?”

“I don’t believe in sex between a professor and a
student, or between a person in power and a person dependent on that power, no. Some lasting marriages have come out of such affairs, but not many, and not when the professor is married to someone else at the time. Was B. Franklin married?”

Luellen blushed. “Yes,” she said. “He was. I did feel guilty about that, but, well, I couldn’t really help myself.”

“And did he listen to you, at least at first?”

“Oh, no. I listened to him. But he did appreciate the fact that I could listen intelligently and ask meaningful questions. By this time, of course, he’d given up George Eliot and was writing on some less well-known male novelists. I loved discussing his work with him.”

“His wife wasn’t, on the other hand, able to ask such meaningful questions?”

“Oh, dear.” Luellen dropped her head at Kate’s tone, which, Kate knew,
had
been a bit harsh, and tried surreptitiously to wipe away a tear.

“What finally happened?” Kate asked. They had better stick to the relevant facts, or at least return to George Eliot.

“He found another student to ask meaningful questions, I guess,” Luellen said, sniffing ominously. “I’m sorry,” she added, accepting a Kleenex from a box Kate pulled from a desk drawer where she kept them for student use when required. “Does all this have anything to do with the play?”

“I don’t know,” Kate said. “It might. Tell me how you found the play. Did Frank help with that too?”

“Yes. Someone else had found it. It’s a long story. Descendants of Helen Faucit’s found it in an old box in the attic. Apparently George Eliot had given it to her when they decided not to publish it, and it just stayed there, in the same house.”

“Which has been in the family all these years?”

“Oh, yes. Faucit and Theodore Martin moved to the country, to Surrey, and a niece of hers inherited the house, and it’s stayed in the family, or branches of the family, ever since. They cleaned out the attic–well, it is like all those old stories about finding papers, but in this case it’s true.”

“And how did the play come into your hands?”

“I got a letter from the man who now owns the house, the one who had gone through the stuff in the attic when they decided to turn the attic into living quarters, and I went to England to look at what he’d found. He said he had been given my name by a friend who taught English in a school and was crazy about George Eliot. The friend had read my dissertation; it was about George Eliot’s conviction of the necessity of work. I was surprised that he’d even heard of it, but life is like that sometimes.”

“So you flew to England.”

“I went right away. It was terribly exciting. The schoolteacher didn’t know what to make of it, but he agreed that it seemed likely to be a play by her; it had all her seriousness and rather shaky verse.”

“Great ideas, but better expressed in prose.”

“Exactly.” Luellen nodded her agreement.

“And you brought the play back and asked for Frank’s advice.” It wasn’t exactly a question. “Surely the authentication would have been easier if the play had been handwritten, either by Eliot or by Lewes; there are plenty of examples of their handwriting around for comparison. Didn’t you think it odd that it was set in type if it was never to be published?”

“It wasn’t so surprising. When Eliot was struggling with
The Spanish Gypsy
her publisher Blackwood offered to set it into type for her so that she could correct it more easily, and he did. He probably made the same offer in this case, but when she saw the play in type she abandoned it.”

“Wisely, don’t you think?” Kate asked.

“Probably, from her point of view. But from our point of view as students of her life and work, it’s of great interest. Surely you can see that?”

“I certainly read it with interest,” Kate admitted. “I might even say I was riveted by it. Surely the expectation of a beautiful woman’s reforming a rake had been seen to be highly unlikely even in Eliot’s time–once a rake, always a rake. In fact, Eliot was remarkably astute in recognizing the tendency of people to follow their dominant trait to the end, wouldn’t you agree?”

“Well, as I said in my dissertation, quoting Mr. Farebrother from
Middlemarch
, ‘if a man is denied love from one woman he can eventually obtain it from another, but not so with one’s work: there is a fit, a suitability, a properness which, once botched, can never be made good.’ I think maybe Eliot came to see that this isn’t true. After all, Lydgate in
Middlemarch
marries the wrong woman–which botches his work; Farebrother probably was consoling himself for losing Mary Garth.”

“But,” Kate said, “you notice that we are discussing
Middlemarch
and not
Savello
. What, after all, is there to discuss about that dreary play?”

“I don’t think that matters,” Luellen said, with more audacity and confidence than she had shown before. “It’s by George Eliot, and that makes it both valuable and interesting apart from its inherent defects.”

“George Eliot would probably not want you to publish it,” Kate said.

Luellen shrugged. There was no real answer to that. What George Eliot would have thought of most of the criticism her works had inspired was anybody’s guess, but her opinion did not matter in the least. In any case, criticism is dissolved by time, but literature remains.

“What, then, do you want from me?” Kate asked. “Beyond my reading the play and talking to you about it?”

“I hoped you’d write an introduction to it. That would give it cachet and get it noticed by the right people. I do want something more than an article in the newspapers. I don’t mind if you say you think it’s a lousy play. After all, George Eliot did decide not to publish it. But you might suggest why the plot would have appealed to her in the first place.”

“Perhaps it only appealed to Lewes, and she went along for his sake.”

“But he had obviously thought it up because he believed that writing it would help her. You could discuss all that, and anything else that intrigued you. You’d get an honorarium of course, and some of the royalties. I’d like to make this splash in the company of a critic I admire, a woman critic. I’ve about decided that men don’t really understand Eliot; not even Haight understands her altogether.”

“Let me think about it,” Kate said. “I’ll call you when I’ve decided.”

And so Luellen left her telephone number with Kate and went away.

ALTHOUGH KATE, BY
this stage in her academic career, had acquaintances on many campuses around the country, the university where B. Franklin worked included none of them. Kate had long been aware of Franklin as a critic of Victorian literature, but a quick scroll through the library computer revealed no recent publication of his, certainly nothing on male Victorian novelists. His last work, on George Eliot, had appeared twelve years ago. Perhaps he had been writing articles not yet gathered between book
covers, but the search for these, while requiring the help of a reference librarian, and a student of Kate’s who happened to run into her in the library, revealed nothing. Was that odd or wasn’t it? Some professors, though happily not too many, having gained tenure, ceased to produce. Of these, some were hard-working members of their university community and highly competent teachers; others, alas, had simply dwindled into sloth.

Kate abandoned Franklin and went in search of Luellen Sampson’s dissertation on George Eliot’s idea of work. Although not published, hers, like all dissertations, was on microfilm and available. Kate arranged to have it sent to her, not on microfilm, which was hideous to read, but bound in a small volume.

None of this really satisfied her. It would have been obvious to anyone involved in whatever scheme was under way that she would check out the major players in exactly this way; their tracks must have been otherwise covered. Furthermore, she had no doubt that an expensive search in England, undertaken by a private investigator she knew there, would establish the reality of the house where the descendants of Helen Faucit lived, their decision to remodel the attic, and permission given to someone for the papers in the attic to be examined by a scholar. Nor, as she had told Reed, did she doubt that the paper and the type on which the play was written would prove to be the right paper and right type for 1863.

By paying for Federal Express and pleading for special favors, Kate got the dissertation within a week. Franklin was listed as the sponsor, with a number of other signatures appended. Kate settled down to read it with appreciation.

The dissertation was carefully argued and well-written; it was also decidedly familiar, yet Kate could not quite
pin down what made it seem so familiar. That problem gnawed at her as the days went by. Still unable to solve the puzzle, she called Luellen to suggest another meeting about peripheral matters, saying she had not yet made a decision. Luellen, though with evident reluctance, agreed.

“
I NEED A
few more details,” Kate said, when Luellen had sat down in Kate’s office. “You said you wanted me to write an introduction. What exactly did you intend to contribute to the book, in addition to the play itself?”

“Well, nothing,” Luellen said. “I was going to tell you that. In fact, it wasn’t really me who found the play. That was an untruth, but I had, that is, I needed … I didn’t see how I could approach you if I wasn’t talking about my own project.”

“B. Franklin found the play, is that it?” Kate asked.

“Well, yes. I suppose my story about an English teacher having heard of me wasn’t very convincing. But of course he had heard of B. Franklin, and called him. The rest was all true, I swear.”

“So I am to write an introduction to a book of B. Franklin’s?”

“Well, yes.” It was, Kate thought, to Luellen’s credit that she made that admission concisely.

“Why didn’t he talk to me himself?” Kate asked.

“Well, he knew your reputation as a feminist, and I guess he thought that you would be likelier to do a favor for a younger woman.”

“But surely he would have to surface sooner or later and I would know I wasn’t doing the favor for a younger woman.”

Luellen looked unhappy. “I guess he hoped that that revelation would occur only after the book was so far along that you wouldn’t refuse to continue. And after all, it is exciting to have a play by George Eliot, isn’t it? It’s a project anyone would be glad to be connected with, isn’t it?”

Kate gazed at Luellen steadily, until the woman dropped her eyes. “I’ll still have to think about it,” Kate said. “I’ll be in touch.” And Luellen had no choice but to depart, even had she been able to think of anything else to say, which Kate strongly doubted.

SHE OUTLINED THE
situation to Reed that night.

“I’d been wondering what happened to that Don Juan type,” he said. “Have you decided to blow the gaff? Are you going to take Luellen to task for suggesting that George Eliot could write such a poor play?”

“Reed, do you know someone who could do a bit of academic sleuthing for me? I need to know more about B. Franklin and I don’t want to be the one to ask, or even the one to ask someone else to ask.”

“There’s a law student in my clinic at the moment who was obviously born to be a detective. He uncovered something … well, I’ll leave that for another time. What do you want him to do?”

“Go to Franklin’s university, to Franklin’s department. Mosey around, ask questions, pretend to be a someone planning to enroll there, whatever sounds workable. I want to know the gossip, as much of the truth as he can uncover, and Franklin’s present status and situation. Is that possible?”

“We can but try. I gather I’m not to say it’s for you; I’ll think up some explanation. And upon our man’s return, you’ll tell me all?”