The Englishman (33 page)

“I was admitted as a graduate student, therefore I must have the academic ability to succeed,” she interrupts me again. “To tell me I shouldn’t be in grad school when I
am
in grad school is another way of saying that Ardrossan’s admission policies are determined by the financial situation of the university, and not by the academic potential of the students.”

She is right. She has summarized, in a few brutal sentences, the situation in graduate schools all over the country. But if I agree with her and she repeats it, I am toast. On wheels. I’m in enough trouble as it is.

“These are very general statements. I would like to hear what you feel about your personal situation. Are you enjoying grad school?”

“I couldn’t imagine doing anything else in the world!” she states in a hollow voice, and her cheeks flame.

Oh, of course. The young man in the observatory. Perhaps I should cast a beady eye or two over the male grad students. I briefly consider asking her what her parents would say if they knew that they are coughing up thirty thousand bucks a year so that their daughter, a girl chastely reared in the fear of God, can have it off with some guy in the attic of her department. She would presumably tell me, and rightly, to mind my own freaking business, and anyway, she is paying for her own tuition, isn’t she?

“That is not really an answer to my question.”

“I’m fine!”

“No, Selena, you’re not fine! But it’s your life, and you have—”

“That’s right, it is!”

“—and you have been brought up with a strong sense of right and wrong. All I can encourage you to do is to trust your own judgment and to be honest with yourself about what you truly feel about something. Or someone.”

Good speech. I should memorize it and tell it to the mirror tonight.

“I am! That’s exactly what I
am
doing!” She seems almost pleased with me for putting it so well. Her face, bare of make-up and exposed by that demure blue headband, beams with relief, and up close I see how white and soft and smooth her skin is, and how her lips are trembling a little.

Well, all right. So this vulnerable, headstrong young woman has fallen into the hands of a scoundrel. But the sex has intoxicated her, and people as inconsequential as a new assistant professor or her study advisor have no chance of getting through to her. Hey, grad school’s a bitch and then you get fucked by a bastard. Been there, done that. Wait till you are on tenure track. Tenure track is an uber-bitch, and you fall for a lovely man who doesn’t even tell you he is dating another woman before you fall in love with him.

Contrary to Natalie’s cattish prediction, the weather on Family Weekend is dry and sunny. The campus appears in its full glory of undulating shrubbery, surging, orange-yellow-brown masses of leaves, and green lawns already dotted with orange and white shirts, banners, and hats. “Pipe, Plover!” is Ardrossan’s war cry, and apparently the Plovers are expected to trounce their traditional rivals, the Lynxes, who are traveling over from the other research university on the other side of Shaftsboro for tomorrow night’s football game. I’m proud to belong to the Ardrossan Family, despite all the squabbles we recently had, and I bought a long-sleeved Ardrossan U t-shirt especially to go with the dress pants I dug out for this day.

When the door of the elevator opens onto the fourth floor, I almost push my bike into Tessa, who comes running around the corner from the hallway.

“You must come,” she says, heaving, pale as a sheet. She grabs the handlebar, pulls my bike out of the cab, and lets it slide against the wall. “Come, quickly.”

“Tessa, what—” Another smashed window? What?

Oh. My. God.

Now it is graffiti. Across Natalie’s and Selena’s office door, in red capitals about two feet high:

WHORE!

And on the opposite wall:

IF A PRIEST’S DAUGHTER DEFILES HERSELF BY BECOMING A PROSTITUTE, SHE MUST BE BUR

“Jesus fucking Christ on a cracker…”

“I don’t think more cursing is going to help!” Tessa flings at me, then bites her lip. “Sorry.”

“No, I’m sorry, Tessa. When did you see this?”

“Thirty seconds before you did? People will be up here with their parents today, and—oh, dear!” She is fighting down tears, and I can understand why. We are standing in the middle of the empty hallway, red hatred screaming at us from the walls.

“And what’s that stench?” I walk further along the corridor, where a foul, pungent smell—

“Fish,” Tessa says, sniffing like a pointer. “Rotten fish. Gross.”

“Well, I guess that sort of fits the general idea. If you’re into vulgarities of that sort.”

“Yes,” she says, “but it comes from your office.”

It does. A biting smell emanates from my office door, which has been liberally sprinkled with some sort of fluid. I peek into the plastic box that is screwed against the door to hold essays and notes, and in it are nestling some stinking chunks of pickled herring.

“Here,” Tessa says and holds up a glass jar, using a Xeroxed journal article like an oven glove. “‘Kranz’s Kosher Pickled Herring.’” It had, of course, been thrown into the cart that is still, on the morning of Family Weekend, sitting under the stairs. Smelling of rotten herring.

I dial Lorraine Forster’s number, but the voice that answers is Matthew Dancey’s.

“Anna—are you out of your mind? It’s Family Weekend! I have to make a speech to the parents in less than an hour!”

“Yes, sir, I understand. But unless you want to make a speech explaining why the top floor is displaying graffiti that says—sorry, I’d like to give you this verbatim—” I pull the phone’s cord out from under my desk and walk into the hall. “‘
If a priest’s daughter defiles herself by becoming a prostitute, she must be bur
,’ I guess he ran out of paint here—I suggest you send someone up here pretty damn quick. Oh, and it says ‘WHORE’ across one of the office doors. Pardon my language, sir, I’m only quoting. And there is the further damage of spilled herring, moldy, pickled herring, which has been slopped all over my office door, so the place reeks to high heaven. Actually, maybe it would be easier to think of a reason why the fourth floor will be closed to all visitors today, only you’d have to inform Modern Languages of that, because—well, it’s their corridor, too.”

I can’t deny that I am enjoying this a little. The customized insult in the form and smell of kosher herring will earn a place in the Lieberman Hall of Fame, and as such it is here to stay. The opportunity to tell Dancey that a wall in his department is displaying the vilest kind of obscenity
re
the pending rape case, however, is too rare and too delicious not to be savored.

Two minutes later Dancey is surveying the evidence for himself, surrounded by everyone else who has arrived.

“I hope you weren’t planning on showing your kids where Mommy has her office,” I murmur next to Yvonne’s shoulder.

“Well, not today, that’s for sure,” Yvonne says with a grimace. “This smell is making my throat hurt, do you want to—”

“Good kosher herring is making your throat hurt?” I exclaim in mock outrage. “You anti-Semite!
Oy
, what next?”

“Stop it, Anna. This is not the right moment.”

“On the contrary, this is exactly the right moment.”

She scans me through narrowed eyes. “You’re furious, aren’t you?”

“Yeah, I’m furious. Sorry, I’d love to get out of here, but I have to stay and see what they’re going to do with my door. I didn’t tell you, did I? A week ago they replaced the lock on my door. No one told me, no one left me a new key. I spent all of Monday trying to get into my own office. And now this. Oh, and there was some sort of oily goop on my door handle before, a couple of weeks back.”

“That’s mobbing, Anna, and it’s anti-Semitic. I told you from the first!”

“Well, it’s general assholery. And the only thing I hate worse than mobbing and anti-Semitism is general assholery, so…we’ll see how this plays out.”

“Anna, if you do meet Teddy and Alethea later on, you will mind your language, won’t you? You have the mouth of a ghetto queen on you.” Yvonne looks at me like a stern mother who understands why her overstrained toddler is screeching but nonetheless has to shut her up.

It is amazing to see how fast the administration of a private university can move if the objective is to shield parents from any knowledge that might confuse them as to where to send their next child. Within minutes of Dancey’s phone call to maintenance, a phalanx of men in overalls has appeared on the fourth floor. The graffiti is not a problem; a fresh coat of beigy-gray might look odd on old grubby beigy-gray, but not obscene. The letters on Natalie’s office door resist the solvent that is used on them, so some posters are found and strategically placed over them. My door is taken off its hinges, placed on a large plastic sheet and scrubbed, using liquid soap and language that would make any ghetto queen blush. I try to keep in the background, but when Larry glares at me, I glare back.

“Will you now stop thinking that I’m doing this myself, Larry?”

“I never said you was doin’ it, ma’am. I’m sayin’ you was havin’ it done to you. Take that Dumpster down, two of you,” he mutters to his young men.

“What, already?” I pout, pushing out my lower lip. “Can’t I keep it a little, to look at and smell?”

He snorts and pulls his mouth to one side. I think I have made Larry the janitor grin.

“Anna?” Tessa appears in the doorless frame of my office door. “Are you coming to hear Giles talk about Raleigh?”

There is a series of pre-lunchtime events in the university book store, and although I know I shouldn’t, I am longing to see Giles. He doesn’t want me, but I know that the sight of him will calm me down.

“You bet! Will you run ahead and keep me a seat?”

Ten minutes later I shunt the men out of my office, push the bike into a corner, lock the door, and gallop down the stairs.

The contrast between the fourth floor and the rest of the building, not to mention the rest of the campus, is surreal. It is warm enough for people to sit in shirts and sweaters on the steps of the stately entrance to the Observatory, on the lawns, and the low brick walls that mark off plots all over campus. This is probably the happiest day of the academic year for the largest proportion of students, and I can’t help but smile at the sight of all these smiling people—nostalgically, because it is now a decade since I was part of this kind of happiness.

On my way to the book store I am stopped by Ross Maher, the football-playing hunk in my Gen Ed class, who in the first session didn’t have the guts to say that Shakespeare’s Sonnet Number 1 was about masturbation. You can usually tell parents who did not go to college themselves and for whom it is a big deal to send their child to a place like Ardrossan. Mr. and Mrs. Maher are forthright, unaffected people, and there is no way I will snub them by hurrying off. They tell me that Ross says I am the teacher who first taught him to read properly.

“That’s what you say, isn’t it, Ross? Read
properly!”
his mom ribs him, and Ross grins in that endearing way only well-brought-up nineteen-year-olds have.

“Mom! You’re embarrassing Professor Lieberman!”

We all laugh, and I protest, “Not at all, tell me more! I can assure you that freshman professors feel as insecure sometimes as freshman students!” This is exactly the right thing to say, and they are very pleased with me when I allow no doubt at all that the Plovers will thrash the Lynxes and wish Ross the best of success in tomorrow’s game.

A group of people seem to have been watching us from the other side of the street. I cross, assuming that they have been admiring the view, but a stentorian male voice addresses me.

“Professor Lieberman? One moment, please!”

Frank Harrison, one of the triumvirate that runs
the
Harrison family’s business, needs no college deans or department chairs to convey his considered opinion about his daughter’s professors. How, he wants to know, did I intend to respond to the fact that a large portion of the students I was teaching this semester found the material disturbing and my manner abrasive and intimidating?