Honest Doubt (8 page)

“Would you rather drink it here or in the living room?” she asked. “The chairs are more comfortable in there.”

“I always like sitting around a table,” I said, settling down. In my experience conversation goes better around a table; people relax more and when I make notes I've got something ready to be leaned on. She sat down opposite me and sipped her coffee—black, of course. Someday those research types are going to discover that cholesterol is essential to health, and the effects of avoiding it downright deleterious. You can bet on it.

“Rick called me,” she said. “He told me you want to talk about the college and particularly the English department. I should warn you that I'm not your best source for information on the English department, although by the time I left I did have the impression that it was in pretty bad shape. Do you remember the Clinton impeachment hearings in Congress, in the House?”

“Definitely. Very partisan,” I added, suspecting that was the point she wanted to make. “The Republicans were out to get him, no other considerations allowed.”

“Exactly. That's what had happened to the English department by the time I quit. The more established professors were against any new approaches to literature, and did not want even to consider them. For instance, there was one of the older members, Daniel Wanamaker, who was chair of the department, a man I liked and had a great deal of respect for; we had served together on a number of policy-setting committees. I hear he's retiring this year. I thought him honorable, which he certainly had been. But when I pointed out to him that the department had blatantly rigged a vote on a new hire—the evidence having been given me, as dean, by a more forward-looking member of the department—he simply shrugged. It shook me up.”

“Is that why you left the college?”

She rose to get herself another cup of coffee. I shook my head when she looked to see if I wanted another. She wasn't a woman to waste words on persuasion, which I liked about her. Try as I might—and I do try, I really do —not to be swayed by first impressions, all the same I get them and believe them. I'm aware that dishonest types know how to make a good impression, but I like to think I can see through that. I can't, of course; no one can, not all the time. But you can't help responding to people. It's just important to be ready to shift views if required.

“It was just a small piece of why I left. Mostly why I left is personal and probably hasn't anything to do with your investigation. Or not much. It is true that the tone, the spirit of the whole college had, in my opinion, badly deteriorated. I'd say that the attitude of that professor in the English department, representing the dominant force there, was repeated throughout the administration. I was fighting a lonely battle; I was fighting it as a woman, which made it harder; and one day I just decided it was enough. I walked out.”

She smiled, anticipating my question. “No, I don't mean I got up from my desk, left, and never came back. I handed in my resignation and finished out the year. They wanted me to stay until they found a new dean, but I wasn't having that. Either the new dean would be a creature in their own image, whom I would dread meeting, or, if not, I would have to warn the poor slob not to take the job.”

“Have you always lived here? It must be quite a commute from the college.”

“I had a small apartment near the college, and stayed there Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday nights. This is where my home was and obviously still is. This is where I've lived ever since my divorce, after our children were grown and out in the world. Surely that can't have anything to do with Professor Haycock's murder. It's a while since I've even seen anyone from the college.”

“Did you know anything about the fight to promote that young woman whom they succeeded in turning down? That seems to have been a major event in the life of the English department—the culminating event, so to speak.”

“I knew something about it because I'm a friend of Antonia's. We used to meet from time to time and talk about the department's situation; she was very upset about that decision and about the way it had been handled. Sometimes she'd drive out here for a cup of coffee—just like you. Would you like a cookie, by the way? Have one. I made them.” She pushed the plate toward me; I'd been eyeing them in the middle of the table, and trying to avoid glancing at them too often.

“Do you live here all alone?” I asked. I knew she did, but it pays sometimes to ask questions to which you know the answer, as opposed to suspecting the answer. People respond to personal questions differently, and how they respond tells you about them; at least, I find it does.

“Very much alone,” she said. “Look, Ms. Woodhaven—”

“Woody,” I said. “Everyone calls me Woody.”

“Perhaps you should know the sort of peculiar woman I am before you put any stock into what I have to say about the college. Because I'm a very odd person indeed; some might even say madly eccentric.”

I looked interested, which I was, and nodded. I decided to take one more cookie and stop thinking about them. My appetite, if sufficiently indulged, reaches a point where it's willing to give up its demands. She smiled, having followed my reasoning about the cookie. I liked her for that, and got on my guard.

“The truth is, I probably welcome the chance to tell someone I don't know how it was all worked out in my mind. I haven't talked about this in a long time, and not often then. You see, leaving my job wasn't all I left. I sometimes think I would have stayed there, at the college, if it had been a place I could feel allegiance to and want to be part of. But since it clearly wasn't that, it had to go, along with everything else that was supposed to be central to my life.”

“Like your marriage,” I suggested, just to help her along.

“No. My marriage ended years before all this, when the children were in college. I'm in my sixties, you know.” I did know, but there was no point in saying so.

“Here's the part that will probably shock you, and make you think I'm hardly a credible, or at any rate, an altogether reasonable witness. My children, with their children, came here a few years ago for Christmas. They had always come, but this turned out to be the last time. I didn't mind preparing the food; I like to cook. I had bought and trimmed a tree, and I was acting as though Christmas were an occasion I was bound to enjoy. And when the children were young, my husband and I, and in those days our parents, did enjoy it. Perhaps it's truer to say it didn't occur to us not to enjoy it; it was something we did. It was a natural way to celebrate Christmas.

“On this particular Christmas, the grandchildren were especially noisy and unpleasant, and so were their parents—my children. I didn't say anything, but I suppose my displeasure was evident. The day finally came to an end with me straightening up here and returning my home to the way I liked it: quiet, tidy, with all my things where I had left them, or wanted them, and with no thought of anyone else in my space. It seems odd to me now that I had never before felt quite so overcome with delight at being alone here, rather like a cat purring, that kind of contentment. We don't know, of course,” she added, “that cats purr because they are contented, but that's how it sounds and so that's what it means for us.”

I nodded; I liked the way she didn't make claims she didn't feel entitled to. I liked the fact that she was thinking as she spoke, not just repeating a long-practiced rendition of resentment. So far, anyway.

She got up to get us more coffee. It was delicious coffee, but if I drank much more I would have to pee, which would interrupt the session. I let her pour it, all the same. I'm not as disciplined for a detective as I should be, as I'm the first to admit.

She sat down again and continued. “I don't quite know what I would have felt if that had been all there was to it, but my children, both of them, wrote to tell me that they resented the way I had treated their children. I had not responded to the little ones' request to watch a video with them. I had to keep an eye on the food cooking, of course, but the truth, which I was determined to face, was that I didn't want to watch that video, and I didn't particularly want to watch the children watching it, which was supposed to offer me, as a natural grandmother, extraordinary pleasure. I didn't think that I had to indulge my grandchildren, just because it was expected of me.”

She looked out of the window. “You know,” she said, “something snapped, or perhaps I should say fell into place. I don't want to offer you an extended disquisition on a woman's life, and how it is made to seem that she really wants what she has, how she believes she has what she wants, and, if she has any secret desires, which are against all the forces of her culture, she hardly dares to face them.” She paused for a moment. “At the time, after that Christmas I mean, Antonia sent me a sentence from Simone de Beauvoir's autobiography. Beauvoir had written of some woman that ‘she was going to mingle with the others, she was going to submit to their conventions and their lives, betraying the “real life” she had glimpsed in her solitude.' Well, I did it the other way around; I had begun by submitting to the conventions, and now I was going to glimpse my solitude. Antonia is a good friend, and a great supplier of relevant quotations.

“I thought maybe I should never have had children, never pretended to enjoy family holidays, never in fact become a dean to earn enough money to support the children and get them through college.”

“What would you have done? Stayed a professor?” I really wanted to understand.

“I don't know. That was in the past, and I was a different woman then. All I could know was what I wanted now, and what I wanted now was absolutely clear. To begin with the really shocking bit, I discovered I didn't want to see my children again. Isn't that frightful? I actually admitted to myself that neither they nor their company brought me any pleasure. I had done all I should have done for them; I was the best mother I could be. Now that was over. I sent them letters saying that I didn't think we ought to meet or communicate anymore. I was careful to state plainly that this was not a response to their letters but simply the truth of how I felt. Believe me, Woody”—and she smiled at me— “it is a terribly shocking idea that a mother might not care to go on seeing her children. A man might do that, just barely, but a woman—she must be mad! Well, maybe I was.” She looked up at me, as though expecting an expression of distaste.

“I'm not shocked,” I said. “I don't want children and don't like them. For one thing, I can't understand why, if there is more than one of them, they scream all the time. At least those that I meet do.” I don't know why I wanted to tell her that, but since it was true I thought it might indicate that I could sympathize.

I decided to put it another way. “We have families, and we owe them support and nurturing”—I didn't want to say
affection
—“for a certain amount of time. But why must it be forever if we don't want it to be? Children not liking their parents is just to be expected; parents not liking their children is harder to swallow, I guess.”

“Yes,” she said. “And the relief was enormous. As though a heavy weight had been lifted from me, as though . . . well, let me put it this way: I've had a cataract operation—I'd been nearsighted, and suddenly this late in life I am able to see without glasses—that's what this decision about the children felt like. It seemed a miracle. Everything else followed from that; I did what I wanted; I made a routine for my day and followed it; I found work I wanted to do.”

She saw my question. “I had been a professor of classics. When I began, gender was not a subject anyone discussed. I started reading the Greeks again, and was struck by how central women were in Greek drama, although they were without any power in their society. Why is that? I asked myself. Of course, other critics had noticed the same thing, but that just made my work more exciting. In short, the college, my children, the need to worry about what I wear vanished—E. M. Forster had one of his characters say, ‘Mistrust all enterprises that require new clothes.' ”

“Did Antonia tell you about that?” I asked.

“Yes, I think she did, long ago. I've always remembered it, though I couldn't tell you when or where he said it.”

“Maybe I'll ask her,” I said.

She nodded, but she was still thinking about the great change she had brought into her life. “I like conversation,” she said, “and can't bear people un-talented in that way. Am I ever lonely? That's what I'm often asked. Yes, sometimes I'm lonely, but never as lonely as I was in my marriage, or in the company of my grown children. Here's a minor thing that may seem silly: when I want to watch something on television, I watch it, I can sink into it, nothing draws me away. I don't have to explain why I'm watching some absurd program, as I had to do with my children when they were visiting. I don't watch frivolous programs often, but when I do, it's bliss to just do it, as if it were a sin, really!”

I didn't know what to say. I felt the same about living alone, but because I hadn't married, and didn't look like the sort who'd been overwhelmed with offers from men to shack up with them, no one considered my happy solitude peculiar. It was one of the advantages of not marrying I hadn't exactly realized before. Just then, a cat door I hadn't noticed swung inward and a large cat entered the kitchen.

“Time for the cat to eat,” she said, getting up to prepare a dish of food. The cat jumped into a chair and watched her, cleaning itself to pretend it wasn't watching. I do like cats. Someday I'll get one, or maybe two so they can keep each other company when I'm not there.