Joanne Dobson - Karen Pelletier 06 - Death without Tenure (11 page)

Ned pursed his thin lips. “I thought it was my obligation to let you know.”

So that’s why, when we were walking, Boylan hadn’t brought up any campus gossip about my possible guilt; he’d only heard it after we’d parted in front of Emerson Hall. Yet another nail in my coffin.

But Ned was continuing, “And certainly because such…er…suspicion…will factor into any…hmm…any personnel deliberations.”

Such as my tenure decision
.

“Forewarned is forearmed,” Ned continued.

I stood up and left his office without the words of humble gratitude he obviously expected.

“Prick,” I muttered under my breath, once I’d gotten into the secretary’s office.

“Watch your mouth!” my mother admonished.

“Mom,” I said, “and Monica, how’d you like to go out for an early lunch? My treat. We’ll go to Rocco’s and get some of those great meatball wedges. Or maybe we’ll have a late breakfast at the Dolphin. Waffles and whipped cream. If I don’t get off this campus, I’m going to…to…well, let’s just say, I’ve got to get off this campus for an hour or two.”

“No shit!” Monica said. The door to the inner office had been open the whole time Ned was “forewarning” me. She turned to my mom. “Adele, how about it. Want some lunch?”

***

The ginger-haired American hulking over the petite African girl by the main campus gate could not be mistaken for anything other than a cop. When I saw them, I gasped, and Mom said, “What’s wrong, Karen?”

In her delicate traditional garb, my student looked extremely fragile next to Boylan’s overbearing presence. I was too far away to hear what he was saying, but she almost seemed to be cowering under the onslaught of his words.

“What the hell, Boylan,” I yelled, and took off at a run, leaving Mom and Monica behind.

Boylan glanced around and saw me, said something curt to Ayesha, spun on his heel and stalked away through the crowds of between-classes students.

“Ayesha,” I called. She hesitated, then she too turned her back on me. Even in her long green robe, she took off at a pace I couldn’t hope to follow.

Chapter 14

Friday afternoon

Mom was with Earlene, until I finished teaching Joe Lone Wolf’s American literary Outsiders seminar. My only preparation was to stop by Monica’s desk and ask for copies of Joe’s syllabus and class roster, and the cookie key so I could get into his office. The syllabus and roster were for classroom use, the key for a look through the office, where I hoped to find something pedagogically useful—detailed class notes would be nice.

Although Joe and I had been hired the same year, I’d never been invited into his office. I don’t think any of his colleagues had. He’d been a real loner. Now, standing in the hallway in front of his door with the cookie key in my hand, I felt as if I were committing a violation—trespassing on the dead.

Nonsense. The man might be dead, but his classes still had to be taught. I was here legitimately, looking for a course plan and a grade book.

I inserted the key in the lock and turned it. The slatted window blinds were closed, letting in mere slits of light. Already the air was filled with motes of dust. With some dim notion of Native beliefs gleaned from reading Tony Hillerman’s mystery novels, I wondered whether Joe’s death spirit was hovering here. Whether those dust motes were…I shuddered. And what was that smell? Very faint…It smelled like…like
the past
. Like my wilder days, tame as they had been. Like weed. Like Mary Jane. Like pot.

Surely Joe hadn’t smoked marijuana right here on campus?

But I was here for a purpose, not for lurid speculation. I focused on Joe’s desk. It was heaped from edge to edge with papers stacked to various heights. I groaned. No way was I about to find class notes, or even a grade book—not in that landfill. Taking a quick survey of the dim room, I saw that teetering piles of books and even more stacks of papers cluttered the floor, which was navigable only by paths leading to the desk, to a student chair, to the bookcases, to a little table by the window. Whew!

By contrast, the bookshelves that covered three walls were as carefully arranged as if in a museum, filled with Native Indian crafts, artifacts, and weapons. A bright woven rug hung on one side of the window, with a large hunting bow mounted vertically on the other side. A notched tomahawk with silver bands on the handle hung over the window-seat, and another, smaller war axe stood close at hand on a shelf by the door. But in that first glance I truly paid attention to only one thing, the fierce eagle-feather war bonnet, ermine skins dangling down each side, which crowned the coat rack. I stood in the doorway, staring at it: surely this was the headdress Joe had been wearing in that huge portrait on the easel that Ned had now positioned in the hallway by the department office.

It looked like a hopeless mission to find anything that would help with teaching. In the few minutes I had before class began at four, I’d be better off getting a cup of coffee than burrowing through the mess of books and papers. Sighing, I closed the door, turned the knob to check that it was locked, and headed to Emerson Hall to meet Joe’s seminar. I’d have to wing it.

As I approached the seminar room, I could hear a hubbub of nervous chatter that died as I walked in. From a dozen matching green-leather upholstered chairs set around the square cherrywood table, the students eyed me warily. Their real professor had been murdered; who was this imposter? And what fresh hell was she about to unleash on them?

I wished I knew the proper protocol for taking over a murdered colleague’s class, but I must have missed that session in graduate school. So I just sat there for a moment, looking around the table from face to face, attempting to get some sense of the classroom atmosphere.
Wary
, as I’d noted from the start. Quite wary. But why?

Ethnically it was a more diverse class than any I’d taught at Enfield: young people of Asian, Caucasian, African, and Native descent, two or three of them gloriously multiracial, looking to me like the American future. Of the dozen students on the roster, three had the surname Lee. I took attendance; one Lee was a Caucasian with a Southern accent, who looked as if she’d descended from a Virginia plantation family, the other two were Chinese. Hank Brody was in this class, along with Cat Andrews and Ayesha Ahmed, the latter still dressed in her long pale-green robes. At least I had a friendly student base I could call on to help me out—if I needed to.

“So here we are,” I said, “after the tragedy of Professor Lone Wolf’s death, you with a new professor and me serving as a stop-gap teacher until the department can find someone permanent to continue the course. I’d like to make the best use of our time today. Tell me—how far have you gotten in the syllabus?”

“Oh,” said a girl with a ski-slope nose and a waterspout of chestnut hair jutting from the top of her head, “we haven’t been using the syllabus. Joe said he just put that together to satisfy departmental requirements.” She looked smug, as if she were operating on a higher plane of sophistication than I was. “Anyhow,” she summed up, “literature is
passé
.”

“It is?” I glanced at the syllabus Monica had given me. It looked like literature to me, beginning with native oral literature, moving through slave narratives, ending with current Latino fiction and Asian-American poetry. Pretty standard multicultural American lit course: I’d taught all of these texts myself at one time or another. I raised my eyes to the class again, and then it hit me: yes, I had taught all of these texts, and had taught them all at the same time, in the same exact order and from the identical anthology, two or three years ago in a course called multicultural American literature.

This was
my
syllabus, and Joe Lone Wolf had copied it word for word, substituting only his name and a new course title! My hands tightened on the stapled-together paper sheets and I took a moment to steady myself. Which was more appalling? That Joe had stolen my syllabus? Or that
literature
, to which I had devoted my entire adult life, and in which I had a hard-won Ph.D., was now…what had the girl with the hair said?…
passé
?

“So,” I continued, sitting back in the comfortable chair, my tented fingers at my lips, “literature is…obsolete, is it?”

“Yeah, so over.” She looked a bit like a Dr. Suess character. “Along with print and with writing itself—so twentieth-century. Joe said that this syllabus represented the ossified concept of the Outsider mandated by the Western literary tradition from which we would depart.” She sounded for all the world like a well-schooled parrot. I waited for the concluding squawk, and it came. “That, of course, is a concept ordered by outmoded terms such as ‘truth,’ beauty,’ ‘content,’ ‘quality’.”

Oh, no, don’t tell me—Truth and Beauty are also passé.

Hank Brody broke in. He was very earnest. “You see, Professor, we’ve been attempting to transcend the constraints of established categories.” Hank looked better today. He’d traded in his baggy shorts and his battered sandals for more seasonable attire: a gray Enfield sweatshirt, new jeans, and sturdy low-cut brown boots. A navy winter jacket hung on the back of his chair. I felt warmer just looking at him.

And I knew that he only had these comfortable clothes because Earlene, having found him freezing in the police car, had bought them for him. That was how destitute the poor kid was.

He continued, “We were moving beyond even the more recent but nonetheless irrelevant categories of class, sexual orientation, and ethnicity.

“Really? Beyond class? Beyond sexual orientation? Beyond ethnicity?” The Enfield College Comparative American Studies Department, which considered itself daringly liberal, hadn’t advanced
that
far yet. “And beyond
literature
?”

“Beyond even the category of ‘category’ itself,” Hank said. “Professor Lone Wolf thought ‘literature,’ for instance, was outmoded as a critical tool, as, of course are those worn-out terms, ‘meaning’ and ‘relevance.’”

“
Meaning
and
relevance
gone, too?” I mused aloud. I found myself shredding the “ossified” syllabus with unconscious fingers. “So, tell me—what criteria do you use, then, in defining Outsider literature? Which is,” I added with some acerbity, “after all, the subject of this course.”

“Oh, you know,” chimed up Waterspout Hair, “
Rawness
.”

“Rawness?
”

There was some shifting in the seats, and the black student with the shaved head and little goatee stopped her with a hand on her arm.

“Yes—raw literature,” the young man said, his dark eyes hooded. This was Elmore O’Hara, and I’d seen him talking to Joe earlier in the semester. “Lit
brut
—narrative liberated by the Internet and other cutting-edge advancements, and…well, er, media…” To a student, faces went blank. What the
heck
? “Narrative liberated,” he continued, “from cultural monitoring, thus allowing
authentic
expression, expression that escapes entirely the dead hand of literary and academic establishments. Blogs, e-mail, websites, listservs, chapbooks, underground lit, self-published stuff and, er,
experiential narrative
.”

A tall young woman with black-rimmed narrow glasses and brown hair in a conservative bun chimed in. “The Internet, among other…um, media, has liberated us even from the concept of ‘writing’ itself. ‘Writing,’ like ‘print’ is passé. Our texts include Facebook and YouTube.”

“Is that so?” What the
hell
had been going on in this course? I pushed myself up from the chair and walked over to the ancient leaded window. Trying to keep my face expressionless, I gazed out the wavy glass at a campus in dusk. Student migration had turned in the direction of the dining hall. Garrett Reynolds walked past our window, a Burberry scarf tied loosely around the collar of his navy-blue wool pea jacket. He held his Blackberry in an ungloved hand and was punching buttons furiously.

Facebook? YouTube
? The kids clearly had been captivated by the adventure of investigating outside even the most recent canon, and I didn’t want to alienate them. But there was a difference between cutting-edge literary investigation and absolute twaddle.
Facebook!
How to approach this nonsense?

We were in one of the oldest and more elegant classrooms on campus, cherry-paneled, with tall, narrow recessed windows and, decorating the walls, portraits of bewhiskered gentleman from two previous centuries. There was nothing either
raw
or
brut
about it. Nor should there be about the education these young people were paying through the nose to receive on this distinguished campus.
Cutting-edge
was one thing; sheer literary anarchy was another.

“So,” I said, turning my attention back from the window. “Raw lit, huh? Lit
brut
? I assume Professor Lone Wolf adopted those categories from contemporary visual art fads, er, trends. But, if you think about it, even Americans educated in the Western literary tradition have cast themselves as Outsiders.” I opened the anthology I had brought with me to its nineteenth-century pages and gave an impromptu lecture on “Outsiders” such as Walt Whitman, who wrote in what he called a “barbaric yawp” and set the type for his own poems, which were so “raw” no conventional publisher would touch them. And I reminded them of Emily Dickinson, who celebrated herself as “Nobody” and refused to participate in print culture at all, by making little sewn-together “fascicle” books of her verses for herself alone. “How dreary—to be—Somebody! / How public—like a Frog— / To tell one’s name—the livelong June— / To an admiring Bog!”

“The instinct to write ‘outside’ the literary establishment, you see, can indeed be radical and liberating, but it wasn’t pioneered by the Internet and, er, other media—whatever they might be.”

The students glanced at each other, and then looked back at me. Something wasn’t being said, and they were still wary. Hank and Ayesha exchanged enigmatic glances. Well, whatever was going on here, it was none of my business. By next week’s meeting, I hoped, the seminar would have a new teacher.

I assigned a selection of Whitman and Dickinson and dismissed the class.

It wasn’t until I was halfway down the hall that I realized Ayesha Ahmed hadn’t spoken a word during the entire discussion.

***

The Dean of Students office was close by in Emerson Hall, on the second floor. My mother had spent most of the afternoon there, crocheting, I assumed. On this unseasonably chilly October day, Earlene had built a small, well behaved fire in the old fireplace. My mother sat in an armchair, hands quiet in her lap now, and the flickering firelight dancing across her face. When had she gotten so old?

“Hi, Mom,” I said. Oh, what was I going to do with her tomorrow?

“I’m hungry,” she replied.

I smiled at her, gently. “We’ll take care of that right away.” Then I turned to Earlene. “I’m sorry, pal. I didn’t intend for the class to run so long. But, man, that Joe Lone Wolf was into some weird shit.”

“You’re telling me.” my friend responded, twisting her lips.

Any other time I would have caught the enigmatic tone in her voice. But right now I was so outraged by what I’d just been hearing that I spilled it all out. Then I finished up: “Can you imagine! When you have Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson available in a literature course, choosing to study YouTube and Facebook! Outrageous!” But, in spite of the outrage, I was curious and wondered if there was some way I could find out just exactly what Joe and the students were up to with Facebook. If I ever had a free moment again in my life—which was doubtful.