The Englishman (39 page)

I almost drop my fork at this. “Lorna O’Neal is a member of the Sexual Misconduct Hearing Panel?”

“That woman is a bulldozer!” Tim groans. “If she had her way, Hornberger would be strung up by the larger of his two testicles and left to rot! She is
rabid!
Just as well, maybe, because the rest of us are chicken.”

“You just said Nick doesn’t deserve to get it in the neck,” Giles reminds him.

“Well!” Tim swallows a mouthful of cake and puts on an expression I assume is supposed to evoke Hornberger. “‘I’m a full professor. My students are of age and of sound mind. It’s nobody’s business how many of them I fuck, how often I fuck them, and where I fuck them.’”

“He did not say that!” I gasp.

“Oh, boy, did he ever.” He grins. “The moment had a certain element of grandeur, I can’t deny it. I think he is trying to scare them. And it’s working! Another gem was when they read that passage about moral turpitude, and Hornberger said something like, ‘Son—’ I do believe he called the Assistant Dean of Studies
son
‘—there is nothing turpid about the body of a young woman. Turgid, yes, if you know what you’re doing, but not turpid.’ Can I say
gross?”

I glance over at Giles and see that he has made a decision.

“Tim, you know that Mandy and I split up when she had an affair, don’t you? Note that I’m saying ‘when,’ not ‘because.’”

“Y-Yes?” Tim clearly doesn’t know where this is leading.

“The affair was with Nick.”

“Oh, Christ!” Within seconds, the blood seems to drain out of Tim’s face. “Oh, my sainted aunt! But how?
Why?
No, never mind.” He manages to collect himself, but it is with difficulty. He laughs. “Sorry about this.
That
was…unexpected.”

“I’ll say.” Giles hesitates. Then he bends forward and briefly lays his hand on Tim’s thigh. “Sorry, mate. Didn’t mean to rattle you. I’ve been wanting to tell you for a while and never quite got round to it.”

Tim stares across the table at me. “You knew this?”

“Not officially.” I try to evade him. “I heard something I wasn’t supposed to hear.”

“How does Ma Mayfield handle herself when Nick comes out with
bon mots
like that?” Giles changes the topic back to Hornberger’s most recent affair. “Or is she not allowed to speak?”

“Oh, she’s a complete dude! Very from-the-hip.”

There is a beat, and we are in convulsions of laughter.

“But why does Hornberger—oh, man…” I wipe some water out of my eyes. “Why does Hornberger provoke them like this? Is he not worried he’ll be fired? Ruined? Publicly shamed?”

“You have to hand it to the man, he is a cool motherfucker. Sorry, Anna. His defense—apart from insisting that he did not force himself on Natalie that night at that conference, or ever, which he can no more prove than she disprove, because she did not go to see a doctor afterward, so there is no official testimony to support her version. There are two photos.” Tim gives an eloquent shudder. “I didn’t look very closely, because she cannot conclusively prove that those photos were taken that night.”

“His defense—” Giles starts Tim’s sentence again.

“Oh, yes, his defense—and I have to say, even Ma Mayfield was shocked by this one—is that he has been having sex with students for twenty-five years, and he has never been accused of sexual violence by any of them.”

“That’s bullshit,” I point out. “That’s like saying, ‘I’ve been driving for twenty-five years, officer, and I’ve never run anyone over before.’”

“It doesn’t make rational sense, but the effect was stunning. Besides, Natalie insists that he told her that there was at least one other incident where he was accused of rape, when he was younger. Maybe that’s more than twenty-five years ago.”

“Hmm,” Giles says, chin in hand. “I’m beginning to wonder whether perhaps Natalie is responsible for the graffiti. You know, like the CIA attacked the Twin Towers.”

“Yes, Cleve, but that is a conspiracy theory cooked up by crazy people,” Tim states flatly.

“
Because
, if Natalie has no proof, what else can she do except make herself look victimized and vulnerable some other way? Writing herself public hate mails would do it.”

“But the second graffiti wasn’t a hate mail. You agreed it was about…well, about sex. Maybe a defloration, even.” I grab a cushion and hug it to my chest.

“Self-absorbed, obsessive, maudlin!” Giles says disparagingly.

“I wouldn’t describe Natalie as ‘maudlin,’” Tim says, and Giles shrugs skeptically.

When the cake is gone, the men proceed to beer. I stick to water.

“I’m saving myself for Erin’s end-of-midterm-grading party on Sunday,” I explain when Tim looks down his nose at my glass. “Talking of which—how do I deal with plagiarists?”

“You send them to Ma Mayfield to have their nails plucked out with red-hot pincers,” Giles says. “Or you could keep them standing by to mop up whatever that Harrison girl next slops against your office door.”

“Homecoming will probably be her next opportunity.” I nod, darkly. “They’ve told Natalie to stay away from the college, did you hear? Especially from events like Homecoming. For her own protection.”

“They should tell the Harrisons to keep their degenerate daughter locked up. Tim, Matthew thinks Anna’s hater is one of our spoilt brats, one who’s too Christian to read Shakespeare’s sonnets.”

“I don’t…” I sigh and shake my head. “I don’t buy that.”

“So who do you think it was?”

“Well, Corvin.”

All things considered, I still think that Crazy Corvin, Corvin the Invisible, is behind all my troubles. The complaint about my heels, messing with the mess in the garbage cart, the oil, and now the fish. I don’t know how he got hold of the new key before I did, but doesn’t searching my office smell of the same paranoid, secretive mind? Ironically, Natalie’s hater might know. He or she may well have seen Corvin apply the herring. It is not that I don’t believe Madeline Harrison capable of this kind of adolescent malevolence, but it strikes me as improbable that she would advance these two very different weapons against me on the same day, rotten fish and her bully of a father. No, I think it was Corvin, and I must decide what to do about him.

While Tim is pulling on his cycling boots again, Giles takes the plates and mugs into the kitchen and re-emerges a few seconds later, a little bewildered.

“Were you aware of the fact that you have two youngsters copulating in your backyard?”

“
What?”

I don’t even bother to look out the window. I rush out the back door, but on the other side of the brook there is no one. The men follow me, both looking alarmed, and Tim finds the message they left for me dangling from a low-hanging twig: a semen-filled condom.

“
Logan Williams!
This is middle-school humor, you…
douchebag!”
I yell into the shadows between the trees.

“Anna, come.” Giles takes me by the arm and draws me away, his shoulders shaking with laughter.

“Did you recognize him?”

“No, it was just two figures, er, moving.”

“I’m sure it was him! If I catch him fucking my landlady’s daughter, I’ll make chopped liver out if him!”

“Long, blond hair?”

“No. No, that’s…she’s okay, she’s a tomato picker from Poland.”

“D’you want me to get rid of…that?” He tries to suppress it, but his face is gleaming with wicked laughter.

“What, that? Thanks, but I’m not having my guests dispose of other people’s disposed-of condoms.”

Our eyes meet only for a fraction of a second, but again I feel a seismic wave travel through the earth, up my legs and into my womb.

I am in a panic of indecision. I can’t orchestrate a reason for Giles to stay. Do I even
want
him to stay? If he really wanted to stay, he could cycle off with Tim, lose him at the next junction, and come back. I am too shy to even look at him again to see whether he would like to come back. No, we are both carefully looking past each other.

Just as well. Who would prefer sex to grading essays, anyway?

Chapter 22

O
N
M
ONDAY
I C
YCLE
A
CROSS
the Observatory parking lot, across Library Square, past Harrison Lab, along the river promenade, across the stone arch bridge into Ardrossan. When I hand the manila envelope to the elderly woman behind the counter in the post office, she says, “To England? This one’s sealed with a kiss, am I right?”

“Yes, you’re right. Wait—” I take it from her again and quickly kiss it for luck. “Oh—have I smudged it now?”

“No, it’s fine, dear. If half the love letters in the world were mailed with half the dedication as these…” She weighs and franks it. “That’s three thirty-one, please.”

Every other year the English department hosts its own Homecoming reception—what Nick Hornberger called “the black lining on the cloud of Family Weekend.” For two hours on Friday afternoon we will be welcoming English Lit alums, and they are sure to be interested in one thing and one thing only: the sex scandal. Hornberger
lui-même
will be conspicuously absent from this occasion but not, more importantly, from the opening ceremony at the new Institute for Cognitive Science, Linguistics and Psychology. Apparently there was a ruckus about this amongst the President, the Provost, and the Board of Trustees, but Hornberger insisted that he was innocent until proven guilty, and as such—that is, innocent—he had every right to celebrate the coming to fruition of a several-hundred-thousand-dollar project that he had been working on for over a year. Fair enough. Meanwhile the men who had to clean up the E-4 hallway on Family Weekend are now posted at strategic corners of the Observatory to prevent a repetition.

I shake a lot of hands that afternoon and smile so much that my cheek muscles begin to tremble. Dancey steers us through the official program with professional efficiency, but he cannot stem the flow of gossip afterward. I say gossip, but the term disparages the experiences and memories of these women—more than three-quarters of English Lit alumni are in fact alumnae—that span a period of more than forty years. Those who were here five or ten years ago confirm that Nick Hornberger was notorious in their days for his favoritism and his affairs.

“He was in charge of assistantships, scholarships, fellowships—tedious paperwork for his colleagues, so they were happy to leave all that to him,” Annie, class of nineteen ninety-six, remembers. “And boy, did he pick ’em! The fourth floor looked like the catwalk of a beauty pageant!”

“The one good thing you can say about him, he is color-blind.” This information comes from a very attractive African-American woman, who adds hurriedly that her then boyfriend, now husband, was a member of the basketball team, so Hornberger never hit on her. “But I know of several girls who—well, he was charming, so they were rarely offended. I never heard worse of him than that. Flirting, I mean.”

I catch Yvonne’s eyes and I can see what she is thinking, but we had better shut the fuck up.

A woman whose nametag says
Elaine Shaw, ’77, Tulane
has been standing in our circle without commenting, and her silence becomes so conspicuous that I apologize to her for talking about a person unknown to her.

“Oh, I know Nick,” she says grimly. “Except he wasn’t called Hornberger then. He took his wife’s name, didn’t you know? Ex-wife’s, now. He was born Nicholas Eagleson.”

This is news to everyone, and Janice, the black woman, wonders what on earth possessed him to change his name from Eagleson to Hornberger.

“You may well ask,” says Elaine.

After an awkward silence, I speak for all of us. “I think we
are
asking.”

“He raped a girl in my dorm. Nick was on a football scholarship, confident, popular, going places. Mary-Lou was biracial, not conventionally beautiful, but striking—tall, very beautiful hair, and…well, these days it’s called curvaceous. But she never quite found her feet at college; first-generation student, you know how difficult that can be, especially for girls from underprivileged backgrounds. In short, he exploited her vulnerability. Befriended her, helped her with her coursework, that sort of thing. She was flattered, felt she owed him. And don’t forget, this was in the mid-seventies. The world was a little different then. Mary-Lou was persuaded to file charges with the college authorities—” Elaine flushes a little “—which was entirely the right thing to do, politically speaking! Imagine it, one of the first female students of color at Ardrossan, and what happens? She’s raped by a football star!”