The Madwoman Upstairs (10 page)

“I—”

“I’m not finished,” he said. “Crucially, it is Pope who engineers this contradiction. He is a master masked as a fool masked as a master. Do you see? Alexander Pope,” he concluded, “is a genius.”

“Make up your mind.”

“No,
you
must make up your mind,” he said. “Pope’s essay demands that the reader be the final critic. He is teaching you that the best student will question his opinion.”

I waited for the
thwack
, but it didn’t come. The bubble of silence was disarming, as though an orchestra had missed its cue. We waited, lingering in the swollen pause.

I cleared my throat. “May I speak?”

He looked kind—almost. “Please.”

“Pope is just pretending to solicit another’s opinion. Anyone as young or as cocky as a twenty-three-year-old genius is only feigning modesty.”

Orville raised an eyebrow.

I continued, “He wrote this poem for the one purpose of showing how much smarter he was than everyone else. You said it yourself. He engineered it. He’s a pompous ass masked as a modest man masked as a pompous ass.”

I wanted a meterstick, too, just so I could hit something for the hell of it. Instead, I swallowed and tried to maintain eye contact with Orville. There was another silence, longer this time. For a moment, we sat staring at each other, so deliberately frozen that we could have been posing for a hidden portraitist.

“Tell me,” Orville said, smiling, “why does a twenty-three-year-old protégé, as you say, elicit such a violent reaction from you?”

“I’m not being violent.”

“Look down.”

I did. I had the first page of “An Essay on Criticism” clenched in between my thumb and forefingers. It was crumpled in my grip and the page had wilted, like the damaged wing of a dove. I took the book off my lap and gingerly placed it on the table.

“I don’t like Alexander Pope,” I explained.

“Some say that hate is only unachieved love.”

“Whoever said that obviously never hated anyone before.”

I caught his eyes then and, as usual, looked away. His jaw was strong and square, like it had been forged out of steel.

I thought the conversation might be over, but he said, “There must be one author who arouses your less aggressive passions.”

Passion.
There was that word again. I sat back in my chair, trying to think of authors I halfway liked. But Orville’s face had induced a temporary amnesia, and every author I knew promptly evaporated from my mind. The only name I could think of was Julius Caesar.

I said, finally: “Frederick Douglass.”

Orville’s eyebrow curved upward again—slowly, this time, with expert precision. “Frederick Douglass, the former American slave and abolitionist?”

“Yes.”

“Any reason?”

Yes, I had a reason. No, I did not want to share.

I said, “I find him . . . poignant.”

Orville leaned forward to scribble something on a sheet of paper. He was so large that his limbs seemed to spill out of the mouth of the chair; his knees buckled, his pant legs hiked upward, his elbows jutted over the armrests. The image made me wonder what a young man was doing in such an old chair, and why, out of all the careers James Orville III could have chosen—espionage, torture, psychological warfare—he had picked a profession that cooped him up in a fourteenth-century literary prison, with books as his companions and quivering students as his lunch.

“Very well, Samantha,” he said, finishing a quick note to himself. He stood up and, after a brief search through a nearby shelf, pulled down a book. In a moment, he handed it to me. “As you wish. Frederick Douglass. Let’s begin.”

“Now?”

“I expect you can discuss him very well, if you are so passionate about him.”

I blinked. Wasn’t the tutorial over? Besides, I had lied. Frederick Douglass was not my favorite author. He was my father’s. Dad always said that Douglass’s
Narrative
was one of the two finest pieces of literature he could recall. The other was
Anne of Green Gables
, which he said grasped shockingly real-world themes. (Like the narrator, Dad had always been terribly concerned with whether or not
Anne
should be spelled with an
e
.
Tricky things, names, aren’t they?
he had once said to me.)

“Tell me why you like this book, Samantha,” Orville said, smiling.

I gave a grunt and picked up
Narrative
. I flipped to the scene my father found most interesting. It was the moment in which Frederick Douglass described a brutal slave master, Mr. Gore. I put my thumb on the page and handed the open book to Orville. At the end of a long and gory account of their dealings, this is what Douglass had to say:

. . .
and thus the guilty perpetrator of one of the bloodiest and most foul murders goes un-whipped of justice, and uncensured by the community in which he lives. Mr. Gore lived in St. Michael’s, Talbot county, Maryland, when I left there; and if he is still alive, he probably lives there now. . . .

Orville read the passage and looked up, unimpressed.

I explained: “Douglass is telling the truth. Not spiritual truth, or metaphorical truth.
Literal
truth. Douglass is not so subtly asking his readers to hunt down this man and kill him. He might as well have given us Mr. Gore’s street address, apartment number, and morning schedule.”

I could almost feel my father’s ghost erupting in the corner of the room, egging me on
. Yes, yes,
he would say,
that’s very good!
Yet Orville had a frown on his face. He interlaced his hands on his lap.

“Do you think that Douglass is a reliable narrator?” he asked.

Something twitched in my face. I wondered if Orville knew he slowly was driving me to apoplexy.

I said, “Now may not be the right time, sir, but I really hate that question.”

He ignored me. “Answer it.”

“No, I mean, I
really
hate it.”

“Answer.”

“Yes,” I said. “Frederick Douglass is reliable. If you can’t trust a diary, how can you trust any author who has ever lived?”

“You can’t,” Orville answered. He handed me the book. “Which is why the life of an author should not inform the evaluation of a book. We must treat this text as any other work of fiction. Turn to page seventy-one.”

“No.”

“Pardon?”

“Sorry.”

I cracked open the book. Page seventy-one. I looked down. In my old copy back home, this was the scene on top of which I had doodled a dragon.

“Tell me what’s happening,” Orville said.

I glanced at the page. “Frederick Douglass is fighting his master.”

“He’s not just
fighting
his master,” Orville said. “He is engaging in one of the most epic battles in any slave narrative. The fight lasts for a full two hours, or didn’t you notice?”

I didn’t respond.

“Two full hours, Samantha,” he repeated. “Do you find nothing suspicious about that?”

“No. The man was ripped.”

“The man was lying.” He stood up, one hand in his pants pocket, one hand behind his back. “Have you ever fought with someone, Samantha—really, physically fought?”

“Have
you
?”

“Few people can stand more than a few minutes of full exertion. Douglass, the narrator, exaggerates the struggle so the gravity of his situation becomes more apparent. It is the most basic concept of fiction, which you continually fail to understand. This is not a fistfight; this is the universal battle between oppressor and oppressed. It is the turning point in a slave’s fight for freedom. There is no way Douglass could have made us viscerally feel this moment’s significance without first turning it into fiction. You need to look at a book as an artistic entity, not a self-serving diary. He is not one slave. He is every slave who has ever existed. This is not
literal
truth, but
emotional
truth.”

He had walked toward my couch and was now standing over me. I could smell the tuna on his breath.

I said, trying to stay calm, “I don’t think you and I understand literature the same way, sir.”

“Yes, I can see that.”

“You think that good nonfiction is, in fact, fiction. I think that all good fiction is actually nonfiction.”

He frowned. “Did your father teach you that?”

“It’s part of what he called ‘tangible truth.’ ”

A pause. Orville’s gaze bored down into the top of my head. A strange emotion seemed to be kneading its way through his normally inexpressive face. I knew what he was thinking: Did my father believe the Brontë novels were nonfiction? I didn’t say anything.

“Very well,” Orville said. “You may go.”

He turned around and walked to the windows, where he brusquely threw open the curtains. An aggressive morning light tore into the room. I had never seen the room in natural light—only ever by the hellish glow from the fireplace—and it was grayer than I imagined it would be. It was like a vast ocean floor that had been drained of water, and now everyone could see how old and tired it really was. I started to pack up but stopped myself.

“Sir?” I said.

“What is it?”

“How much do you know about
Agnes Grey
?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Instead of reading Alexander Pope or Chaucer, how about we read Anne Brontë?” I said. “I would be curious to hear your analysis of her books.”

There was a long silence. I didn’t think I had asked a difficult question, but perhaps I was mistaken. For the first time, he looked awkward.

“Samantha, I—” He stopped himself. “That is—I would prefer not to discuss the Brontës with you.”

“Why not? It’s an academic project.”

He didn’t look convinced. “I cannot help you.”

“Why not?” I said, and when he didn’t respond, I added: “
Please?
”

I sounded more desperate than I had intended, and I wished I could reel my words back in. Our eyes met. My cheeks burned. I wondered if this was another one of the rules in the giant green
Old College Book of Disciplinary Procedures
:
Professors shall not help their students.
I turned away. I could feel Orville’s eyes on me as I packed up. When I was finished, I walked to the door. My hands were shaking. I never asked for help, and people shouldn’t be rejected on their first try.

“Do you know what I think?” I said, turning back around. “I think you’re refusing me because I know a lot about the Brontës and you do not.”

He stared at me with a calm, experienced expression. “Don’t flatter yourself, Samantha.”

We didn’t say goodbye.

Someone at Old College was out to get me. This person’s name was H. Pierpont, one of the
Hornbeam
’s most prolific and consistently irritating staff writers. If Pierpont’s last two articles weren’t bad enough (“Tower Welcomes New Occupant But Has Anyone Ever Seen Her?” and “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Brontë?”) I woke up on a chilly November morning to some more verbal vomit in the paper:

BRONTË LEGACY EXPOSED?

PARSONAGE CURATOR WRITES NEW BOOK

This latest article was about Sir John Booker, who had apparently turned his nasty op-ed from years ago into a nasty book. According to Pierpont, his forthcoming exposé promised to “unpack the literary legacy of the Brontës” and would be “interesting.” I wished people would stop publishing their opinions on the Brontës. New books did nothing but feed an increasingly delusional public imagination. My fuller-than-usual in-box was already stuffed to the brim with unread inquiries from the press. I deleted them systematically, one by one, the way one might shred defunct checks.

I crumpled the flimsy page of the
Hornbeam
in my fist and tossed it into the bin in the corner of my room. So far, my attempts to figure out the identity of Pierpont had met with no success. The
Hornbeam
’s website had surprisingly little to say about its staff. For a student who so enjoyed meddling in my business, Pierpont revealed nothing about his—or her—identity.

Perhaps I had Pierpont and the
Hornbeam
to thank, but as the next few days passed, I couldn’t help feeling that I was being watched. During meals, I would turn around to find the gaze of faceless, nameless students resting upon me; during my walks, joggers would sometimes do a double take. And more than once as I walked through the exaggeratedly carpeted Faculty Wing, I felt a sidelong look from a passing professor. Those eyes followed me down the hall and into Orville’s office, where sometimes I imagined they still watched me from behind his closed doors. Had I done something
wrong
? Had I walked on the lawns, spoken out of turn, or used my spoon in a regrettable fashion? Had I violated page two hundred and eighty-four in the rulebook
?
Or was it simply suspicious that I was a young woman spending a great deal of time with Oxford’s only aggressively attractive professor? For whatever reason, the entire Faculty Wing had become one giant, raised eyebrow.

It was around this same time, in late November, that I decided I could no longer look the Governess in the eye. It was too painful. I had tried to live in peace with her, but I had failed. She seemed to be screaming out to me—louder, then louder. Would I let her expire? Well? Would I? She reminded me of Anne. She reminded me of Emily. She reminded me of Charlotte. If I wanted to get philosophical, she reminded me of myself. (I did not want to get philosophical.)