“I think,” Dean Fleming said, making a motion in the air in front of his face as if trying to coax the words out of his own mouth, “some of this is, at best, questionable. Or, I should say”—more coaxing—“it raises questions. Or, at least, one could see how questions might be raised.”
Mira nodded. She had no idea what he was trying to say.
She was having a hard time concentrating on his face, which seemed oddly distorted by the pale sun shining through his window, directly onto him, as if he were standing in headlights. She tried to appear as if she were carefully considering his words as she glanced around his office. For some reason, which she felt sure was not intended to be ironic and also had nothing to do with the Edgar Allan Poe poem, Dean Fleming kept a taxidermied raven on his bookshelf, just over his left shoulder. It had the beady eye of Poe’s bird, and Mira could easily have imagined it squawking, “Nevermore!” except that part of its beak had crumbled away and one of its wings was mostly sawdust. Mira couldn’t keep herself from staring at it. Dean Fleming had pulled a copy of her first-year seminar syllabus out of a file drawer and placed it on his desk between them. Now he was directing his comments to the syllabus, as if those six stapled pages could hear him.
“I’ve received a number of such questions from parents, which is, of course, of less concern to me than the concerns raised by the students themselves—”
Mira recognized instantly the reference, the deference, the dean was making to a recent Honors College meeting, during which numerous professors had excitedly, resentfully called for a moratorium on what was called “parental meddling.” Implications had been made that the dean was passively encouraging this meddling by not actively putting a stop to it. It had been generally agreed upon by Honors College faculty that this generation of college students had parents who were over-involved. That the students were “adults,” and that when it came to issues of curriculum, grading, et cetera, the faculty should not have to answer to parents, was the subject of several long monologues during that meeting, during which Mira had watched the clock with a rising sense of despair and panic because she had told Clark she’d be home a half hour ago.
Now she nodded to the raven, and Dean Fleming continued to speak to her syllabus on his desk.
“I think we need to reconsider,” he said, “not only the direction your teaching is taking, but also your research.”
This time Mira was surprised enough that she looked straight at him, hard enough that he had to look up and meet her eyes. The light was pouring down baptismally on his head, and she noticed that either he had a bald spot that was just sprouting new growth or the cold November light was somehow singeing away a round place in his full head of hair. She tried to think about how to say what she was about to say before she said it, but her heart had started to race, and she simply blurted out, trying to keep her voice from shaking, “I felt that you seemed quite supportive of my new project when we last—”
Dean Fleming waved his hand. Mira noticed, for the first time, a small dark ruby on his pinky. He seemed to notice her noticing it, and he tucked the hand away beneath his desk.
“I was laboring,” the dean said, “under a false impression.”
Mira leaned forward. “Which was . . . ?”
“I didn’t realize it was so, so, so—death-laden, so popularist. Of course this sort of thing can work in some cases, but those cases are rare. We’re a research institution, Professor Polson, one of the most formidable in the country” (how many times had Mira heard this since her first on-campus interview here?) “and the field of anthropology is not, it seems to me, particularly well suited to the, the, the . . .”
Mira wiped her sweating palms on her knees, feeling the heat through the black tights she was wearing, as if her hands could burn straight through her clothes, melt her flesh into her flesh.
“Anyway,” he said, “it’s beside the point. The point is we can’t have you teaching Death Studies in our college, or doing ‘exposés’ concerning university tragedies of the magnitude of the Nicole Werner incident. I’m sure you see, yourself, how unseemly it is. How, how, how . . .”
“Dangerous?” Mira sputtered, unable to help herself.
“Yes,” Dean Fleming said defensively. “Yes, well, dangerous. But also unseemly. As I said. It isn’t done. For one thing, this fascination of yours is not material for a serious academic project. The sort of research you’re doing, and the teaching is, is—”
“—is what I was hired to teach, and to research. You were on my hiring committee, sir. Except for some improvements, the class I’m teaching follows the exact syllabus I presented at my interview, the one I recall you praising for its rigor. You said, and I believe it’s in my evaluation from last semester, that I brought something both to the college and to my research that was ‘dynamically different.’ ”
“That was prior to the Nicole Werner work.”
“The Nicole Werner work? What do you mean?”
“I’m talking about the suicide of one of our students, Professor Polson. You must certainly understand the seriousness of this, that—”
Suddenly, she understood:
Lucas.
He was already getting heat for Lucas. After every suicide, there was a witch hunt. Mira had been on college campuses long enough to understand that.
She swallowed. At least now she knew what she was dealing with. At least now she could address it head on. Blame had to be laid.
She looked from the bright spot on the dean’s head to the raven, and then down to the syllabus on his desk, and then back into Dean Fleming’s small, piercing eyes. She took a deep breath and said, “I certainly understand the seriousness of suicide, sir. It’s one of the things I try to bring to full light for my students. My major purpose in teaching the courses I teach is to deromanticize death, and to effectively convince a disbelieving segment of the population, youth, as to its permanence. Believe me, there were no students at the morgue today who don’t understand that now.”
“I’ve been informed that he was working with you. Lucas. That he’d—”
“He wasn’t working with me. I interviewed him about Nicole Werner, yes, and—”
“And he says as much in his goddamned suicide note, Professor Polson. Do you have any idea what this means?”
Mira shook her head. She could feel her blood beating at her temples and behind her knees. His suicide note. She said, nearly spluttering the words, “He didn’t commit suicide because of me.” Then she took a moment to think about it, and actually laughed out loud. “There were reasons that boy killed himself, and there was plenty the college could have done, but none of that had anything to do with me.”
“Well, maybe that’s true, but you were a faculty member aware of his problems, and—”
“And I informed Mental Health Services after the interview. I spoke with three therapists. I spoke with Lucas himself. I made an appointment for him. I did everything except walk him over there myself.”
“Well, you didn’t inform his parents, who, as you can imagine, are—”
Mira laughed again, involuntarily, in amazement. “Oh, my God,” she said. “Dean Fleming, I have a statement in my contract specifying that, under the Confidentiality of Academic Information Act, I can under no circumstances contact my students’ parents. The university is a closed system. Remember? I’m not to contact police, medical professionals, and surely not parents. Those were your exact words when I was hired. A closed system.”
He cleared his throat. He licked his lips. He paused for what seemed like a long time, and then he said, “You misunderstood. And this course of yours, it’s encouraging a death cult in our college.”
This time it was so funny Mira couldn’t even laugh. “I’m encouraging a death cult?” she asked.
“Yes. There are girls directly influenced by your class who have started a club devoted to trying to contact Nicole Werner and some other dead girl. They claim to be seeing ghosts. They’ve done some serious injury to themselves, and to the facility. Cutting. That sort of thing. Their candles caused a fire.”
Mira felt all the breath inside her leave. She waited for the dean to go on, but neither of them spoke, and finally she shook her head and said to the silence between them, “There are always crazy college girls. Those aren’t my students. You can’t blame me for what crazy coeds do in a dorm.”
Dean Fleming looked around him then, as if he’d lost his raven and was trying to locate it, and then he put his hands on his desk, folded, looked back at Mira, and said, “Believe it or not, there’s more.” He leaned a little closer, as if there were someone else in the room who might overhear. He said, “There’s the question of your relationships, Mira, which have been called to my attention. Your husband has informed me that you’re involved in a . . . situation. With a student. An extracurricular situation.”
Mira had then the sensation of having been hit by a blunt object, a blow to the head, and she remembered, suddenly, once, in the dark, getting out of bed and stumbling into a bookshelf, jarring a solid brass bookend off of it, and the blank, dull feeling when it smacked her just above her left temple.
Such surprise, it wasn’t even painful. The pain was somewhere so deep inside her it did not register on any physical scale. It took her several seconds to open her eyes again, blinking, and recover enough to say, “What? My husband? You heard from my husband?”
“Yes. But that’s only part of this. A part of it. I have my own concerns, my own reservations, about your relationship with Professor Blackhawk.”
“Jeff?”
“Yes.”
Yes.
The drive out of town to get her twins, passing, on the way, Dean Fleming, who was standing at a crosswalk.
Now, Mira understood that the blank expression on the dean’s face as they drove by had been his way of registering the two of them together, maybe adding it up with other things he’d suspected. Idle gossip in the faculty lounge. Hunches, glimpses. “Jeff?” she asked again. It was the only thing she could think to ask.
“In truth, it’s none of my business,” the dean said, “although it’s another delicate matter, and relationships between colleagues in a program as intimate as ours have to be discouraged. But I’m less concerned about Jeff Blackhawk than I am about Perry Edwards, who is a student. I know you know how seriously this university takes the crossing of the line between a student and a teacher, and I have to warn you, Mira, these are puritanical times we’re living in. You can’t expect to remain employed here and behave in a manner that is, that is, that is . . .”
Mira put her hand to her temple, feeling it again—that dull ache in the dark at the back of her head—and managed to say, again, “My husband called you? Clark called?”
Was it possible? Was that why he’d left? Was that why he’d seemed not to feel any guilt about taking her children away from her, and then not even calling to tell her where they’d gone?
Dean Fleming lifted a shoulder as if he weren’t sure what his answer should be.
“Where is he?” Mira asked. “Where did Clark call you from?”
“Mira, this was some time ago, and your marital problems, although regrettable, aren’t the reason why—”
She stood up, although she could not feel her legs beneath her. She said, looking down on his bright spot, his bald spot, his soft spot, “What is the reason, then, Dean Fleming? Because all of this, whatever this is, has been—no offense, Dean Fleming—utter bullshit.”
She felt the shock of her own words register in the look on his face, but didn’t wait for him to react. She held up a hand, and said, “I’m sorry. Forgive me. But there’s something else happening here. This has nothing to do with Jeff Blackhawk, and certainly nothing to do with Perry Edwards. This has to do with Nicole Werner, and the sorority, doesn’t it? It has to do with Nicole Werner, and my research, and my class, and Lucas and Perry, yes—but it’s not what you’re saying it is.”
But what was it? She found herself saying it before she’d even thought it:
“The runaway.”
Jeff’s story was coming back to her now.
A new sense was being made of everything.
She said, as if in a trance, “The girl from the music school. The other sorority girl. No one’s looking for her. Why is that, Dean Fleming? Why would the university so quickly drop—?”
“Oh, for God’s sake, Mira. Don’t become a conspiracy theorist now on top of everything else. Frankly, and I’m sorry to be so blunt here, you were always a wild card. When we hired you we didn’t know, really, what we were hiring. We had no way of knowing. I’ll admit I, like your students, was intrigued by the material and your passion for it, but this simply can’t be allowed to go on. I’m sure I don’t have to remind you here that you don’t have tenure, so if you’re interested in keeping your position, Professor Polson, I suggest you take what I’ve had to say here very seriously, and, and, and . . .”
But Mira had left his office before finding out whether this time the word for which he was so desperately searching ever found its way to him.