The Realm of Last Chances (29 page)

He met her in the Boston Common on a September afternoon. It was just past four, and he’d locked the door at his bookstore for the last time. The shelves had been removed hours earlier, sold to a used-furniture outlet in Malden. The books had been gone for almost a week. A number were already for sale at the Brattle Book Shop, just a few blocks away. He’d taken a couple hundred home. He’d never had many books in his apartment, since it seemed unnecessary. Mostly what he did at work all day, especially the last few years, as fewer and fewer customers walked through the
door, was read. At home he mostly drank. His wife had left him a while back and taken his daughters, and they were all living with another man
.

On an ordinary day, he might not have noticed her sitting there on a bench near the Frog Pond. When he walked by she was blowing her nose. An open paperback lay in her lap, and the cover looked familiar. Since the book was upside down, he had to turn his head sideways
.

Embers,
by Sándor Márai
.

Her blond hair was short and thin, and she wore business attire. Someone who worked in finance, he figured. The financial types liked to lounge in the Common or the Public Garden and use their BlackBerrys to plan ruin for everyone else. You wouldn’t expect to see them reading a book like that
.

His scrutiny didn’t escape her notice. “Have you read it?” she asked. “Or only heard about it?”

Frankie stood there for a moment, then sadly shook his head. He wouldn’t have turned to the next page if you paid him.

on the day before thanksgiving,
when Kristin had sat down with Gwendolyn Conley in the booth in Whole Foods, she knew she was making a mistake. It wasn’t the place to have the conversation, especially with the holiday coming, but it was where they’d run into each other. “Gwendolyn,” she’d begun.

“Actually,” Conley said, “I prefer to be called Gwen.”

“Gwen,” she said, “fine. I need to talk to you about the article you published last year.”

“What about it?”

She didn’t even try to strike the proper tone. “What in the name of God were you thinking?” she asked. “The article’s full of passages stolen from other writers. Did you assume no one would notice?”

Right there in Whole Foods, she saw the life drain out of the younger woman. Her stomach growled so loudly she clamped her hand over her belly, as if fierce pressure would suppress the rumbling. “I don’t understand how that could’ve happened. I did the research. I gave it to …”

“You gave it to whom?” Kristin asked, though she already knew the answer. What had happened instantly became clear to her.

Conley swallowed hard while continuing to press on her stomach. “Would you like some of my coffee?”

“No, thank you. I’ve already had too much. You gave your research, I’m guessing, to Robert Dilson-Alvarez, and he promised to shape it into a publishable article. Am I right about that?”

The younger woman stood up. Kristin thought she was going to leave, and if that had happened she would have been
relieved. Instead, Conley stepped over to the trash receptacle and dropped her paper cup inside. When she sat back down, she said, “Look, I’m not the greatest teacher in the world, but I’m a good researcher. I work hard. It’s just that I can’t write very well. I’m struggling to raise my kids without a partner, I can’t afford to lose my job, and Robert’s a really fine writer. So yes, I gave it to him. I suggested we put both of our names on it, but he said the administration’s trying to make it as hard to get tenure as they possibly can and probably would insist the article didn’t count unless it was single-authored. So that’s how we left it. Maybe it was wrong, but I
did
the research.”

“Did you then read the article?”

“Of course.”

“And you didn’t realize some of the passages were lifted directly, without attribution?”

“I remember thinking that a couple things sounded familiar, but Robert’s usually meticulous in everything he does, so I didn’t question him. I’m sure that for whatever reason he just was in a hurry and omitted a quotation mark or two. It happens. You know that as well as I do. Or at least I assume you do, since you used to do research yourself.”

“Yes, I did. I was never very good at it, though, and I think you’re mistaken about how good Robert is.”

“He’s good enough to publish a book.”

“So he didn’t tell you that he plagiarized his book too, as well as at least one of his published articles?”

The silence that followed might have lasted for only thirty or forty seconds, but to Kristin it seemed much longer. It seemed about as long as her own silence after Philip informed her he’d accepted a position at Ann Arbor and would be leaving with his thesis student at the end of the semester. It was the kind of silence that lingers long after words break it. “You and Robert are lovers, aren’t you, Gwen?” she asked.

“We were.”

“But not any longer?”

“I told him I couldn’t keep doing that to Krisztina.”

“Krisztina?”

“Robert’s wife. She’s Hungarian. She used to be my best friend.” She ran her tongue over her bottom lip. “Obviously, I don’t even know how to be my own friend.”

Conley was slightly built. Her shoulder-length hair had a few streaks of gray, and she wasn’t wearing any makeup. Despite being dressed in a nice skirt and blouse, she had the look of a woman who’d been discarded. And it was this, rather than the chill Kristin had felt upon hearing the name of Dilson-Alvarez’s wife, that made her move over to take a seat beside Conley and put an arm around her shoulders. “Gwen,” she said, “let’s try to figure out what to do next.”

A week later, the day after Matt’s car got stolen, she and Donna were walking across the quad to a meeting in the office of Norm Vance, the dean of liberal arts. It was snowing heavily this morning—three or four inches were on the ground when she woke, probably five or six now—and she could already see that she needed a better pair of boots. At one time in her life snow was hardly unusual, but her years in California had left her ill-equipped to deal with it. “You probably don’t mind the snow, do you?” she asked Donna.

“I certainly don’t love it.”

She glanced at her assistant’s face and saw the special frown reserved for encounters with senior administrators, whom she liked even less than the faculty.

Several times over the last few days, Kristin had wondered how Donna would react if she casually mentioned that on the holiday she’d met a neighbor named Vico who used to live in Gloucester. She never would’ve done so, because acting on this prurient interest would violate the other woman’s privacy. So she almost dropped her briefcase when Donna said, “I got a
call Monday from Vic Cignetti. I understand he talked turkey at Thanksgiving.”

“Oh.”

“Oh? Is that all you can say?”

“I don’t know what else to say. I’m a little embarrassed, I guess.”

“For yourself? Or for me?”

“For both of us.”

“Well, don’t be. All right? That’s why I brought it up. He told me what he’d done, then started to apologize, worried that he’d hurt my career or whatever, but I cut him off. ‘First of all,’ I said, ‘what career? I’m a secretary. I’ll never be anything but a secretary, and before long I’ll retire and quit being even that. Second,’ I said, ‘it will just make me more interesting to my boss. She’ll see me as something other than a dried-up old witch.’ ”

“I don’t see you as a witch, Donna.”

“You just see me as dried up.”

“Not that, either.”

“Well, I am. More or less.” She laughed. “Though every now and then there’ll be a little shower.”

They were both still chuckling when they walked into Norm Vance’s office, where Joanne Bedard glared at them as if they were giggling at a funeral.

“The reason I asked for this meeting,” Kristin began as the four of them sat around the conference table, “is that a couple of weeks ago one of the department chairs told me about an envelope that showed up in his mailbox. It contained photocopies of two articles written by professors in his department. It also contained photocopies of several pages from articles published by other authors, and these had a number of highlighted passages that were incorporated word for word in the articles supposedly written by his faculty members. The passages were
used without attribution.” She nodded at Donna. “Could you give the dean and the provost the packets we prepared?”

Donna set a manila envelope in front of each of them, but neither administrator touched the material. The dean was watching the provost, to see what she would do, and she was looking at the envelope as if it were filled with anthrax.

Finally, Bedard looked up at Kristin. “This is coming from the history department, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“That’s a horrible department,” she said, turning to the dean. “Wouldn’t you say that’s the least accomplished, most troublesome faculty in your entire college?”

As if she’d just slipped a quarter in him and pulled a lever, Vance said, “I’m sorry to say that I’m in total agreement.”

“They’re mean-spirited and jealous, and this isn’t the first time someone in that department’s tried to slander a colleague. People over there have sent hate mail to one another, left threatening messages on answering machines, you name it. They’re just a bunch of malcontents.” She shoved the manila envelope across the table at Donna.

Donna didn’t hesitate and just pushed it right back, stunning Kristin and the dean as badly as Bedard. “You’d better take a look inside,” she said. “You’re also dealing with a plagiarized book, and there’s a statement in there from a publisher to that effect.”

If the provost could’ve acted, her broad, peasant features would have rendered her a perfect political commissar in any number of films about the old Soviet Bloc. With undisguised spite she gazed over her granny lenses and said, “We don’t need you at this meeting. I don’t know why Dr. Stevens thought it was appropriate to include you.”

Kristin had wanted her here because, based on what the history chair had said, Joanne Bedard was likely to dismiss any charges she brought. She wanted a witness, and Donna had
seen more than enough. “If you wouldn’t mind,” Kristin told her, “go on back to the office and finish that spreadsheet we were working on. I’ll see you in a little while.”

“Perfect,” Donna said, then stood up and briefly touched Kristin on the shoulder. When she left, the door closed emphatically.

For a while, no one spoke. Then the provost said, “All right. I’ll take a look at what’s in here. And if it’s not exactly as you say, I’m heading straight to President Randall’s office, and anybody who took part in this inquisition, yourself included, will pay a bitter price. People in that department have been jealous of Robert Dilson-Alvarez since the day he got here. They don’t have his degrees, they don’t have his intelligence, they don’t have his charisma.”

She was still undoing the clasp when Kristin asked, “What makes you so sure this concerns Dilson-Alvarez? I never mentioned his name.”

Bedard didn’t answer, just ripped open the envelope. Noticing that the other person at the table still hadn’t touched his, she snapped, “Open that. You’re the dean, after all.”

Kristin sat there with her arms crossed as they paged through the evidence. Outside, the snow was coming down even harder, swirling in the wind. The forecast was for between twelve and eighteen inches. It would be a great night to sit in front of a fire with Matt and drink a bottle of wine, but that wasn’t going to happen. She would ask Cal to build a fire, wanting to sit down beside him and ask why he’d suddenly grown so silent. She had files on Dilson-Alvarez and Conley, and she’d begun to suspect Cal had one on her. She might as well find out how much of the truth it contained.

After the provost spent four or five minutes looking through the pages, her hand began to pull at a few locks of hair in her pageboy. The dean was bald, so all he could do was probe his G. Gordon Liddy mustache with his index finger. Neither of
them said a word. Once or twice Kristin saw him glancing at Bedard, as if he hoped she would think of some means of making this all go away.

The last two items were Blatchford’s e-mailed statement and a letter from Kristin that provided an account of her conversation with Gwendolyn Conley, noting that she’d asked Dilson-Alvarez to list himself as coauthor of her article, which he’d declined to do. Kristin’s letter also stated that Conley told her Dilson-Alvarez refused to return her original research materials, so under the pressure of deadlines she hadn’t had the opportunity to compare the text of the article against the sources; while this didn’t excuse the unattributed passages, it was in Kristin’s opinion a mitigating factor. “Refused,” she knew, was too strong a word. What Conley actually said was “Robert never gave it back.”

At any other institution where she’d studied or worked, both faculty members would have been fired summarily. But North Shore State wasn’t Case Western, UNC or the University of California. Their standards were all but nonexistent, and there were plenty of incompetent, unscrupulous people on campus, including the two sitting at the table. Gwen had two children from a broken marriage, and she’d been misled by a devious, possibly sociopathic man she was inexplicably in love with, so Kristin hoped the administration would slap her on the wrist and let her keep her job. She’d told Gwen she would do everything she could to secure that outcome. As for Dilson-Alvarez, she hoped he’d be gone before the end of the semester—ideally, in shame, though that’s something he probably never felt.

Once she’d gone through all the pages, Bedard said, “Well, this doesn’t look good.”

“No, it doesn’t,” Vance agreed.

“I’m very disappointed,” the provost added, “in those two.”

The dean shook his head. “It’s regrettable. It really and truly is. Some people …”

Bedard pulled her glasses off and laid them on the table. Word had recently begun to circulate that she was contemplating retirement. She’d been divorced for close to twenty years, according to Donna, and as far as anybody knew she hadn’t had a single companion in all that time. Supposedly there were grandchildren, a son or daughter in another state, given the pictures propped on her desk. Maybe she’d move wherever they were. But how she would fill her days without an office to go to was hard to imagine, just as Kristin couldn’t imagine how she would spend her time when she was needed nowhere at all.