The Englishman (50 page)

“We were all summoned to appear before the Prez and the Prov, individually, you understand, and she admitted it! Felt she couldn’t, in all conscience, stand by while the university was doing its damnedest—my word, not hers—to sweep Hornberger’s misconduct under the rug. Of course they
are
, and it
is
sickening. Do you know that they approached Nancy, Terry, Martha, and Warren for character assessments?”

“Of Natalie, or—”

“Of Nick! No, Natalie they want to have psychologically assessed. Martha came to my office the other day and told me that the Assistant Dean of Studies had phoned her at home and suggested that she volunteer to give Nick a character reference. He assured her that the whole thing would be handled most discreetly, anonymously, of course, and she would not regret having cooperated with the college in this delicate matter.”

“And she felt she couldn’t refuse.”

“Right. Except he then read them out. Aloud. With the authors’ names and everything. Martha thinks Hornberger is a mediocre scholar who has buttressed his position at the department by his extramural connections and his bullying techniques. How can she be stupid enough to be honest! After a phone call! If this doesn’t scream,
You’re being fucked here, baby, and there’ll be no paper trail for you to prove it
, then what does?”

“Oh, man…”

“The other three followed their cues and produced wonderfully creative pieces of fiction. So with these glowing character references in the balance—”

“Tim, if…just supposing there was a similar case from way back, years ago. Would that make a difference to the way the hearing is going?”

“Do you mean the incident back in seventy-six? How do
you
know about that?”

Careful now.

“There was a woman from Hornberger’s year at the Homecoming reception. She told us. How do
you
know?”

If
Greco vs. Hornberger
is all over the papers now, Mary-Lou Tandy may hear of it and come forward to testify. If she wants to go back to that traumatic time, if it is her own decision to get involved, I will make Giles throw the file into the ring. He cannot go on protecting Hornberger.

“Natalie said. She’s full of lewd and lurid stories about Hornberger’s past, including this one, but she can’t prove any of them. Mark my words, Hornberger will end up looking like the innocent victim of a smear campaign!”

“I feel sick.”

“
You
feel sick! What do you think
I
feel! I already had my fingertips on terra firma, Tenurica, the Land of Safety, when I was pulled back into the maelstrom of university politics by an over-excited snowflake and an aging, over-sexed macho! We don’t know what our cue is, from one meeting to the next! Bernie says we should simply carve our signatures into potato halves and tell them to do whatever they liked with them.”

“I’m seeing Bernie the Sunday after next at their house-warming party. I suppose I know nothing of this, right?”

“
Nothing
is already too much. Don’t throw me under the bus now, okay? My tenure committee sits in two weeks’ time. I want that to go as smoothly as a lubed cock into—”

“Eeek! Yes, you’ve made your point, Blundell! I won’t say a dicky bird.”

On Tuesday morning I finally get a reply to my emailed apology to Vicky Benedetto and Pete Kirkpatrick, the organizers of the Notre Dame conference. Pete, who sends the reply, does not bother to pretend that they were not offended by my sneaking out of the conference like that. Nonetheless, they are offering to include me among the selected papers that they plan to publish as a collection of essays. I see this as a confirmation of my paper’s quality, but I also see how close I came to compromising myself professionally. It is like a near miss in the car—you’re grateful worse was prevented and resolve to keep your eyes very firmly on the road in future.

The light-blue lambswool sweater is a trusty friend, but I have not yet had the courage to wear my short tweed skirt, and at the beginning of the semester I would not even have considered combining it with what I consider to be among my coolest articles of clothing: a pair of brown nappa, knee-high, lace-up boots. My classes go like a dream. The remaining twenty-one students in the Comedy class eat out of the hollow of my hand, and Logan Williams—on time, for a change—sits in the last row and gazes at me with a mixture of resentment and fascination. Well, baby, I know that half of you—the lower half—wants to see me flat on my back across one of the classroom tables. But life’s a bitch and then you don’t fuck your professor.

Mental note: You
do not
fuck your professor.

On Wednesday afternoon Yvonne knocks on my office door.

“Anna. I need to tell you something. Do you have a minute?”

“Sure, come in.”

She closes the door behind herself very carefully and walks over to close the window. “I am violating someone’s confidence by telling you this, so please promise me that you won’t do the same? I know that sounds idiotic, but I simply have to talk to someone about it!”

“Is this about Hornbergergate? Actually, Tim calls it ‘Hornygate,’ but you know Tim.”

“When is his tenure review?” Yvonne frowns. “It’s not for me to say, but isn’t he very careless with the things he says in public?”

“Look, the boy’s under a lot of pressure in that damned hearing panel—cut him some slack. Anyway—”

“Yes, anyway.” She inhales deeply and holds her breath for a moment. “There’s this woman in the church I joined last year. She’s divorced, too, lives with her younger daughter not far from me; the daughter sometimes sits with Teddy and Ally in the evenings. Last Sunday—and remember the story about Hornberger was in the
Shaftsboro Times
on Saturday!—we had a clothes bazaar, and she and I happened to have kitchen duty at the same time. I saw at once that something was bothering her, and eventually I asked, and she—God, I find this so upsetting! She told me that she knew someone who was a student at Ardrossan in the seventies and that this woman was raped by Hornberger!”

“A ghost from the past! You wonder how many there are. Will this woman come forward?”

“No, no, you haven’t heard it all.” Yvonne catches my hands in hers. “Anna, I do believe she was talking about herself! I know her as Louise Randall—Louise may easily have been Mary-Lou as a girl! I know that her mother was white, and she is clearly an intelligent, educated woman, and she told me once that her first husband was the manager of the store where she worked. That all fits, doesn’t it?”

The skin on my arms puckers with goose bumps.

“Could it be a coincidence?”

“Yeah, because there were hundreds of women of color at private universities in the mid-seventies!”

“You’re right,” I agree. “
Not
a coincidence. Dear God—what now?”

“I was hoping you’d help me figure that out.”

“How did she seem to feel about the whole thing? The fact that she told you seems to indicate that she needed to talk about it, even if it was under cover of that old chestnut, ‘I have this friend who—’”

“I could repeat Elaine Shaw’s account to her and see how she reacts.”

“Hmm. What kind of a woman is she? Does she have friends to talk this over with? She may not, you know. She may have left Ardrossan and closed that chapter in her life. If she has come to terms with what happened and doesn’t want to go probing old wounds in public, I could understand that. It would be her word against his, and who needs all that dirt flung around?”

I feel a pang of guilt for not telling Yvonne about the file. I ought to tell her, and Giles ought to hand over the file to the police.

I do not tell her.

Then the inevitable happens. I am having a coffee with Tim in the Eatery, going over the members of his tenure committee and his likely external reviewers, when Giles turns up at our table.

“Did you get the email?” Yes, definitely still furious with me, and definitely still the most beautiful man I have ever seen. So much for the theory that one night with the ogre would break the spell.

“What email?”

“Semester review. Yours, not mine. Elizabeth wants to see both of us on Friday.”

“Oh, my giddy aunt…”

“No, don’t worry.” Tim waves away my concern as if it was a fruit fly. “That’s all part of the care the college lavishes on its rookies.”

“I don’t think so. I had seven drops and withdrawals from the Comedy class, and this week I got three emails whining for my permission to withdraw late. What’s the policy of late withdrawal?”

“You mean the official one or the actual one we practice?” Tim asks, rolling his eyes.

“I can’t save your tush every day of the week!” Giles has not sat down.

“You leave my tush out of it!”

His eyes narrow, and my heart beats faster because we both remember. The skin of his stomach sliding along the skin of my buttocks; me arching my back to offer him access to the hidden parts of my body and my soul. Two pillows under my belly to tilt me at the angle he wants me, his hard shaft sliding playfully, a little menacingly, down the cleft between my ass cheeks till it finds its slippery way home. His hand burrowing down till his fingers find me.

I guess now I know why you are not supposed to have sex with people you work with.

“You told me to pamper them. Giles told me to be a bitch. Why do I listen to you at all?” I pretend to be more upset than I am, to justify my tomato-colored face.

“Why do you listen to
him?”
Tim corrects me. “My advice was good! However you conduct your classes later on, in your first year you have to be uber-submissive!”

“We didn’t hire her to be submissive!” Giles fires up. He has flushed, too, with anger or with arousal, perhaps both.

“Of course she has to be submissive! If she values her skin? Yes, she does, and then some!”

Chapter 29

S
INCE
I
T
S
EEMS
I
NEVITABLE
that I will be shot down, my only consolation is that it is Ma Mayfield rather than Matthew Dancey who is wielding the gun. Giles and I are waiting in front of the Dean of Studies’ office, and it’s a toss-up whether I am more afraid of Giles or of Ma Mayfield.

“Giles, I’m sorry. Could we not—”

“Don’t worry about me,” he cuts in, his face like a stone. “I can be professional about this. You do the talking. Ignore me. After all…” He shrugs sardonically.

“Look, I’m truly sorry, but don’t you—”

But we are called in, and he doesn’t want to hear anyway.

“Now, Anna, I regret that your first semester at Ardossan has been somewhat fraught with…difficulties.” Elizabeth seems calm and collected, as usual. “So I would not lay too much stress on this, but I have received written complaints from six students in your general education class.” Elizabeth fans out half a dozen email print-outs on her desk, and I can see that none consists of fewer than two paragraphs of text. “Four of them suggest that your behavior in class could be regarded as sexual harassment.”

At this, my jaw drops. Literally. I lose control over my facial muscles and my mouth falls open.

“Now, look here, Elizabeth.” Three minutes into the meeting, Giles is already riding to the rescue. “You know perfectly well that these accusations are preposterous! I don’t know why these students have it in for Anna, but it’s not because she acknowledges the sexually charged language of Elizabethan sonnets!”

Elizabeth puts on her glasses and picks up one of the emails.

“‘She intimidated me and others with expression like, “Baby, you make my pips squeak!” and “Get outta here!” (said with a broad New York accent that gave it a Mafia quality). When she wanted to interrupt students who were conferring with each other about points made in class, she would signal this by “slicing her throat” with her flat hand.’ Here is another one. ‘Professor Lieberman chose to focus on the sexual content of the plays under discussion. Her jokes often had a sexual coloring, too. This created an uncomfortable learning atmosphere for those of us who do not come from families that talk about such things at the dinner table.’ One more? ‘Professor Lieberman is obsessed with sex. Not a single class session went by without mentioning sex or things related to sex. She made me dread coming to classes.’”