The Englishman (3 page)

She is sitting on the bench with her feet pulled up to her chest, and it strikes me who else she reminds me of: myself when I was her age. I cut off my hair, too, shortly after my
Bat Mitzvah
. I would have cut it off before, but my Grandma got wind of the plan and was so horrified that I waited out my performance at the synagogue before I, as my mother put it, “mutilated” myself. Studying my
haftarah
got me hooked on biblical Hebrew and began a phase of deep immersion in Jewish history and Torah studies, much to the bewilderment—and sometimes irritation—of my almost completely secular parents. Nathan took to calling me “Anshel,” the male alter ego of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Yentl, the girl who wanted to be a yeshiva student; and although I knew he meant to taunt me, I was proud of his acknowledgement of my commitment and academic prowess.

Whoa! Hold the projection, Lieberman.

“I guess you’re really bummed you had to come and live out here.” She considers her drink but doesn’t unlock her arms around her knees.

“Do you mean ‘out here in Ardrossan’ or ‘out here on the farm’? Neither, actually. I wanted to. But then I’m not your age. Fifteen?”

“Sixteen in December. Mistake, though. This place sucks. It’s all rednecks and girls who wear purity rings and give blowjobs to the All Stars behind the gym. Do girls do that in New York?”

She glares at me almost accusingly, and I realize that I have become a canvas of projection for her, too. My estimate of her age was supposed to flatter her; I’m surprised that she is almost sixteen. Mental note: mustn’t let her air of an orphaned street-urchin fool me.

“Do you mean the purity rings, or the blowjobs, or the hypocrisy?” I grin. “I’m sure there’s hypocrisy everywhere. But in a big city in the Northeast it’s less likely to be evangelical.”

She seems delighted with me for calling a spade a spade, and her rigid posture relaxes a little.

“I still don’t understand why you wanted to leave New York City. Why would anyone?”

There are a few things I could say in answer to this question, but since she clearly doesn’t know what she is talking about, I let it go.

“Well, I’m guessing that
you
can’t wait to leave home, either, right? So what’s not to understand?” I give her a meaningful look that has more to do with my mother and Irene than with this belligerent teenager.

“You ran away from home?” Her skin is like creamy caramel, smooth and flawless.

“I think so. But I call it ‘building a career.’ Sounds so much better, doesn’t it?”

The corners of her mouth twitch, but for some reason she is reluctant to laugh with me.

“Well, I won’t go to college.”

“Mmm. Why not?”

“I’m not exactly an A student.”

“You don’t have to be an A student to go to college.”

More sneering. “To get into the Folly?”

“Yeah, okay, to get into Ardrossan you need good grades. But Ardrossan is only one kind of college, and not necessarily the best one, depending on what you want to do with your life.”

“You’re a doctor.” She changes the subject from herself to me.

“Not a medical doctor.”

“Of…English?” She reproduces what she must have picked up at home, complete with doubtful frown.

“English literature is my subject, but I’m a Doctor of Philosophy, really. ‘Philosophy’ is Greek, it means ‘love of wisdom.’ And wisdom is preserved in books, because books live longer than people.”

She watches me closely during this little lecture.

“But you’re…pretty.” She can blush, too, and again she looks younger than she claims to be.

“Thanks. But you don’t actually have to be homely to like studying. That’s what people say who mistrust books and studying. It’s a slur, nothing more. Besides, if you—hang on, that’s my phone. I gotta take that, it may be the college.”

It is the college. They are looking forward to seeing me again, and one little office is waiting to have a nameplate attached to it that reads
Anna Lieberman
. Or, better still,
Straunger, thou art now enteringe the realme of Anna Lieberman, she who hath prevailed!
Taking possession of my new home and being lionized by the Cinderella of Calderbrook Farm are amusing pastimes, but they pall next to the unprecedented privilege that awaits me at college. Yup, after years of sharing tiny windowless holes with half a dozen other teaching assistants or adjuncts, having my own office is definitely a big deal to me.

“Jules, I’m sorry, I have to run in and see my—”

But the bench is empty. So is the bottle of cola. It is lying, empty, on the steps up to my porch, in a bubbling pool of sticky brown fluid.

Oh, for God’s sake!

I pour a kettleful of hot water down the steps of the porch, take a cold shower to clear my head, scrub my hands and fingernails, put on both my best summer college dress and my best behavior, and drive in to meet Elizabeth Mayfield, Professor of Renaissance Literature and parting Chair of English. According to the meter in my car it is only three miles from the farm to the edge of the campus, three and a half to the English department, and I am toying with the idea of adding a bicycle to the list of my new acquisitions. This is absurdly like a second date, or like finding yourself engaged to be married to someone you’ve only met once. We met, fancied each other, and made a commitment for a six-year try-out period. I’m the pretty young fortune-seeker; the college is the rich old guy setting up a detailed pre-nup to make sure it is I who will end up poor and homeless, if our relationship goes down the drain.

Chapter 3

T
HE
E
NGLISH
D
EPARTMENT
I
S
H
OUSED
in the old Observatory, a huge red-and-black building dominated by an octagonal tower with a decrepit-looking dome. The observatory for which the building was named was housed up there, but nobody goes up there now, I was informed on my campus tour. The tower contains the elevator and, snaking round the elevator shaft, the main staircase, a grand stone-tiled construction that gives access to administration and offices on the eastern side, classrooms on the western side, and the department library, an auditorium, and a cafeteria to the south. Fantastically different from University Place, New York City. Prettier, of course, no competition, but I hope it isn’t going to make me feel claustrophobic.

Lorraine Forster, the department’s administrative assistant, asks whether I’d like a glass of tea and points out firmly that she is “Mrs.” not “Ms.” Forster. They make a remarkable pair, Mrs. Forster and Professor Mayfield. Both are, in their different ways, well-coiffed, well-preserved brunettes, but while Lorraine seems to live on carrots and coffee, Elizabeth Mayfield is an imposing woman in layered silk with the bosom and the girth of an opera singer. The voice, too.

“Anna—good to see you again. Welcome to Ardrossan.”

If I have half this woman’s poise and authority by the time I turn fifty, I will consider myself extremely lucky.

“Hello, Professor Mayfield. Thanks—I’m still a little stunned. This place is so beautiful it’s unreal!”

She smiles like someone who hears this all the time about her workplace, but I know it’s still expected that I say it.

“Yes, we are fortunate. Now, I’m guessing you’re impatient to see your new office—” My beaming smile elicits a chuckle of mild amusement. “Well, I’ll have to keep you a little with some administrative business. I’m handing over the chair at the end of the month, but because I chaired your search committee, I agreed to oversee your initiation at Ardrossan.”

“No hot radiators or bottles of Jack Daniel’s, I hope.”

“I beg your pardon?” She looks up from my file, as if she thought she had misheard me.

“Nothing, sorry. Who will take over from you?”

“Nick Hornberger.” She focuses her attention back on my file, and I wonder whether her terseness is significant. Hornberger was on my search committee, too, and he baffled me. With his close-cropped hair and the physique of an aging linebacker, he looks nothing like a paper-shuffling administrator, let alone the reconstructed male I had assumed him to be after surveying his list of publications. His most recent book is called
Rakes, Rogues and Renegades
, an unpardonable title for anything but a paperback with two pairs of nipples and swathes of red silk on the cover. In fact, it purports to be a study of masculinity—or, as the subtitle puts it more correctly,
masculinities
—in the Old South.

Perhaps it is his understanding of antebellum gentlemanliness that made him touch my arm or my back every time we passed through a door on my campus tour. I don’t think there is any harm in Hornberger; he is just a middle-aged macho who needs to flirt with younger women. But I am thankful that it is Elizabeth Mayfield who seems to be taking me under her wing.

“I think Giles Cleveland would be the right person to take you under his wing,” she says in her placid alto voice.

“Oh—uh—that’s—great.”

“Do you know Giles?”

“N-No. Well, I know of him, of course, and I heard him at a conference once, but I haven’t
met
him.”

Giles Cleveland, associate professor of Renaissance Literature and director of the Early Modern Studies program, has, in the last few years, turned into a force to be reckoned with among scholars of the English Renaissance. A good choice as a mentor, as regards his scholarship. But he is also a bit of an oddball. An Englishman born and raised, he came to Harvard as a postdoc and never went back home. I heard a rumor that he would go to Stanford, but apparently he is still here. Now in his early forties, he is reputed to be charming but difficult, an interesting and entertaining speaker at conferences, but I have heard people say about him that he is an embodiment of English arrogance, bringing civilization to the colonials. He is definitely not popular with everyone. Elizabeth seems to think she is doing me a favor. I jolly well hope she is right.

“We had most of the little offices on the fourth floor painted during the vacations.” She looks up and smiles. “But your humble abode might benefit from a quick sweep and wipe. You could ask the cleaning staff to put you on their list, but frankly, I wouldn’t advise it. Everyone is coming back right now and finding that their offices need cleaning, and—well, you know what it’s like. They’d probably make it up there in December.”

The next day I put my home improvement on hold, chuck rubber gloves, dustpan, liquid soap, and rags into a plastic bucket, put on jeans and t-shirt again, and go on another nesting mission. Appropriate to their insignificance in the larger scheme of things, assistant professors are located on the top floor, like a mixture between children and servants in the upper-class Victorian household. I am comfortable with that. I reckon it will be much cozier up here, with the other assistant profs, the adjuncts and the graduate assistants, than downstairs with the—um—grown-up folk.

My office is small—a third the size of the study at the cottage—but it has a proper desk, a filing cabinet, and floor-to-ceiling shelves that need scrubbing, and—oh, glory!—leaded windows. The only flaw in the set-up is that the whole room is clogged up with dozens of plastic bags, boxes, folders, hardcover volumes of journals I’ve never heard of, stacks of what seem to be old student essays—
Katie Clough, 1/8/1985,
I read on one—and piles of overhead transparencies.

“You must be joking. This?” I ask the janitor who unlocks the room for me and is making me sign for the key.

He checks the small print on the sheet.

“’Fraid so. Lieberman, E-four-twenty-nine. This is it, ma’am. You can phone for garbage disposal, extension thirty-three twenty-two. But they won’t go on and empty the room for you, they’ll just leave a big trash can.” He shrugs and leaves me to my own devices.

I blow the dust off the grubby phone on the desk and call admin. “Mrs. Forster? Anna Lieberman here. Oh, you’re the intern…Katie, right. Not Katie Clough, by any chance? No, of course not. Sorry. The thing is, Katie, I’m upstairs in my office, but it’s full of books and paper, and some of it seems to be old essays. I need to know what to do with them.”