Читать книгу Death Comes for the Deconstructionist - Daniel Taylor - Страница 8

When I asked Mrs. Pratt why she wanted me to start with Daniel Abramson, she looked away and sighed. She said she liked him very much, but there had been some unpleasantness between him and her husband before Abramson’s abrupt retirement the previous year. She said Pratt hadn’t talked about it with her, but had alluded to it obliquely a couple of times, saying something about “doing what I have to do for the good of the department,” and how it was the worst part of his job. She didn’t know anything more specific, but thought it was a place to start.

It certainly wasn’t where I wanted to start. I had taken a class or two from Professor Abramson when I was at the university and thought highly of him. He was definitely old school—the gentleman scholar, highly cultured, fluent in five languages, careful in speech and dress, a man who had put all his faith and hope and love into the life of the mind and the imagination. Abramson had emigrated from Budapest shortly after the end of World War II. Apparently he’d hidden out during the war, posing as a pre-seminary student at a Catholic monastery near Szentendre. He got his PhD at Columbia in the 1950s and had been at the University of Minnesota ever since.

Professor Abramson made a big impression on me when I was a student. He approached each work we studied like a shy lover, quietly praising its form and vision. Sometimes he would close his eyes and repeat from memory the words of the text (in the original language), letting their caressing rhythm flow over him. To tell the truth, it embarrassed us. We would exchange looks and suppress smiles. But I have to say that secretly I admired the hell out of the guy. It must be great to love something that much, to find it that important. Why, he loved Tolstoy more than I ever loved my wife (and I still do love her).

Dr. Pratt loved literature too, but in a different way—more like a mistress than a wife. He once said language performed a kind of Dance of the Seven Veils—now revealing, now concealing; exciting us here, disappointing us there, but ultimately just an illusion, nothing more than a tease. Shakespeare, apparently, was the verbal equivalent of Little Egypt.

And if words were ephemeral for Pratt, so were convictions. He changed his positions more often than a runway model changes clothes. He didn’t have principles, he had attitudes. Better, he had moods. He took positions on things as his humors dictated, but could melt away from them like butter on a hot skillet, melting words and ideas providing the slippery slide of his escape.

There is room for both Pratt and Abramson in the universe, but they did not coexist all that comfortably in the same building. By the time I was at the U, Abramson’s star had set, though he was still respected. Sort of like a former racehorse too old now even for stud, but put out to pasture to enjoy his dotage. His book on the impact of the scientific revolution on literature and art in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had been a standard for twenty years. It was said he had turned down offers from Johns Hopkins and Berkeley to stay in Minnesota. He directed so many dissertations that he had to turn students away.

But things had changed by my time, and more rapidly since. He was eased out of the department chairmanship, on the grounds that he deserved more time to write. He found, as his own peers began to retire, that he was increasingly outvoted on new appointments. He vigorously protested a revamping of the curriculum to emphasize “cultural studies,” but lost in a landslide. Fewer students signed up for his seminars, fewer still asked him to direct their theses and dissertations. The invitations to speak at conferences dried up, the prestigious journals were politely uninterested in his articles, his dog no longer ran to the door when he came home.

It feels more than strange to be going back to the Humanities building at the university—Abramson still has a small office there even after his retirement. I haven’t been back since the day I had my career-ending conversation with Dr. Pratt. The place is definitely haunted.

I leave Judy in the English lounge, where she sits herself down at one end of an abused sofa and pronounces herself right at home.

“You go ahead and talk … I should say, talk to your friend. I will stay here with my own self and … and … watch the world go by.” It’s a phrase our mom used a lot, and Judy laughs with pleasure to have pulled it out at an appropriate time. Judy’s fondness for cliché is positively ontological. Clichés provide a kind of conversational proof that the universe is ordered. Clichés are something you can depend on.

I had called Professor Abramson and explained why I wanted to see him, but neither of us really knows why I am in his office. He greets me very politely and asks how I’m doing. I can tell he is searching my face to see if he remembers me. Heaven knows I never gave him any reason to. I wrote a few indifferent papers for him, took my indifferent grade, and proceeded on with my indifferent life. If he remembers me, it is in the same way one remembers the melting point of copper—a bit of stray information tangled up in a random ganglia in one of the minor folds of the brain.

“Yes, Mr. Mote, I recall your paper on the varying levels of consciousness in the narrative voice in Kundera.”

“You do?” I barely remember the paper myself.

“Well, I won’t claim to recall the details, but I remember thinking it showed a kind of rough promise.”

Rough promise. That was as upbeat an assessment of my life as I’d heard in a long time.

“I’m glad you thought so. Not a promise kept, I’m afraid.”

“Oh, I don’t know. Promises sometimes get fulfilled in unexpected ways.”

I want to get off my life and onto Pratt’s death, so I abandon transitions and make a leap.

“As I explained on the phone, Professor Abramson, Mrs. Pratt has asked me to talk to people here at the university to see if anyone might know something that would be helpful to the police in solving Dr. Pratt’s death.”

“His murder.”

“Well, yes, his murder.”

“One doesn’t solve death, does one? One solves a mystery or a crime.”

“Right. I guess no one has solved death, have they? Sorry.”

Abramson smiles faintly. I already regret accepting this job. When you’re looking into the popping rates of popcorn, no one looks through your eyes into the hollowness of your soul. You just deal with information, not motivation, not implication—not, for heaven’s sake, murder.

As is his custom, Professor Abramson senses my discomfort and tries to relieve it.

“Please forgive me for being pedantic, Mr. Mote. You can appreciate that we are still upset here about what happened. We not only lost a valued colleague in a terrible way, we are also a little worried for ourselves.”

“Why is that?”

“Until they know who killed Dr. Pratt, we can’t be sure it isn’t someone who would like to do the same thing to the rest of us.”

“The rest of who?” (Or should it be whom?)

“The English faculty. Or anyone here at the university for that matter. Things have changed since I began in the profession. It’s a much more … contentious place, as perhaps you noticed even when you were here.”

He is being careful. He is by nature reticent and doesn’t know how open to be with me, neither a student nor a colleague.

“How so?”

“It used to be you could argue about whether Milton ruined English poetry and then walk across the street and have a beer together. It was a difference of ideas, not of a clash of worldviews. Now everyone has an enemies list.”

“Enemies list?”

You can tell he wishes he hadn’t said it.

“Well, that’s too strong of course. It’s just that we used to divide ourselves by specialty or even century—Victorians, medievalists, Shakespearians—and we could talk to each other. Now we divide by ideology and politics and causes and we are infused with suspicion. It’s ironic, Mr. Mote. We have never been so opposed to talking about the moral dimension of literature, and yet we have never been more moralistic and judgmental. And whom do we judge most harshly? The great writers and thinkers of the past. They were, we convince ourselves, little more than imperialists, abusers of women, exploiters of the poor, defenders of a corrupt status quo. Their poems and novels and plays, once thought to be works of genius and insight and wisdom, are now paraded about like handcuffed prisoners being carted to the guillotine. And we, the teachers and scholars, lead the young in howling our abuse.”

Professor Abramson has picked up a small bust of Bartók from his desk and is rotating it in his hands. He is conducting, for the thousandth time, a painful conversation within himself, and the outcome can only be sorrowful.

“Not, of course, that any of this leads to murder. But combine an atmosphere of accusation and suspicion with a student who is running up huge tuition bills and has been abandoned by his girlfriend and who believes all the latest conspiracy theories and has just had his dissertation rejected and … .”

Abramson stops abruptly, as though suddenly aware of my presence.

“I apologize. I’m getting carried away. As I said, we are all upset at Dr. Pratt’s death, and maybe a bit paranoid.”

“I understand completely. It has to be a difficult time for everyone. If I may, I’d like to talk a bit more about this idea of an ‘enemies list.’”

“I’ve exaggerated that. It’s really very civil around here most of the time. Everyone acts correctly. We smile at each other in the hallways. The academy gets attacked enough from outsiders, and I don’t want to contribute to that.”

“What kind of relationship did you have with Dr. Pratt?”

There it is—out on the table, a little too bluntly I fear, but no taking it back. I hate that I used the word “relationship” with Professor Abramson. It is a squishy, abstract, shop-worn word from our pop psych culture, and it comes out on its own.

“Our relationship, as you call it, was as it should be. He was chair of the department and I respect that position—a position I once held myself, by the way. Most people here do not recall that I was chair when Dr. Pratt was first hired. In fact, I cast the deciding vote in his favor. He was young and inventive and energetic, and we needed all those things at the time.

“And his career subsequently has proven that we made the right choice. He published three widely acclaimed books. He made himself a recognized force among the guerilla avant-garde of the profession, and he brought a lot of grants and attention to a somewhat tired English department, which in recent years he had almost entirely reshaped.”

That is a fine summary of Dr. Pratt’s career for a speaker’s introduction, but it evades the thrust of my question. How do you get a naturally reserved Hungarian-born, war-seared, library-dusty scholar of Eastern European literature to talk to someone like me about his re-la-tion-ship with a dead colleague with whom he was, apparently, in conflict?

That’s easy—you keep asking transparently stupid questions in transparently awkward ways.

“Did you and Dr. Pratt get along?”

Abramson shifts in his chair and pauses a long time before answering.

“I would like to be helpful, Mr. Mote, but I am not one to analyze professional relationships in the terms you are suggesting. As I said, I helped hire Dr. Pratt, I watched with some amazement the unfolding of his highly visible career, and I lament very much and very sincerely the ending of his life. It was no secret in the department that he and I had very different understandings of literature and life and of the direction of our profession. But that is, as I said earlier, the nature of academic life today. I may wish things were otherwise, but I do not find many allies in the academy, and I am too old to tilt at windmills. Nevertheless, and this is the point most relevant for your purposes, I most certainly have never wished any of my colleagues ill.”

He starts gathering some papers on his desk and putting them into his briefcase.

I want to assure him that I know, of course, that he himself has never wished any harm on Dr. Pratt. I want to say that I am only wondering if he knows of anyone else, student or colleague or janitor, who might have been upset with Pratt. But I know the interview is over even before he stands up and holds out his hand.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Mote. Even though my teaching career is over, I am still writing and I need to go to the library. I wish I could have been of more help. It was good to see you again. If anything pertinent comes to mind, I will be sure to inform you.”

When I return to the English lounge, I find Judy deep in conversation with an unusually attractive young woman with dark hair and tusk-white skin. She is sitting next to Judy on the sofa, each turned toward the other as though they are sharing secrets.

Judy spots me over the woman’s shoulder and flashes me that bright, puppy-dog look she gives when pleased. Then she launches into one of her laboriously formal introductions:

“Well, there you are, Jon. I want … I should say, I want you to meet my new friend, Miss Bri … Miss Brianna Jones.”

Miss Jones, indeed. I offer my hand as she rises from the couch.

“Brianna, this is my … my brother of mine, Mr. Jon Mote.”

We exchange greetings as Judy beams from the sofa, satisfied that she has once again successfully navigated another of life’s shoals.

“Your sister was just telling me that you used to teach here.”

“Oh no, no. I was a graduate student here once. No. I never even finished. I was a grad school dropout.”

“Well, I’m about to join those ranks myself. I was telling Judith that I’m here to close out my accounts.”

“Have you finished a degree or are you taking a break?”

She looks out the window.

“Well, I’ve finished something, but it wasn’t a degree.”

She seems sort of upset. I’ve been around upset women enough to pick up on the signs. My wife used to send out more distress signals than a sinking ship. But have you ever tried reading signal flags at a thousand yards? There was lots of waving and gesturing, but what the hell was she trying to say? “Abandon ship”? “Come on board”? “Torpedoes off the starboard bow”? Not being much good at the hermeneutics of female cues, I usually just sat there, contemplating the cold Atlantic waves.

This time, I pull anchor.

“It’s been nice meeting you, Brianna. Let’s go Judy. We’ve got to get home.”

It takes a three count for Judy to process that it’s time to go and then notify her body.

“Yes, Jon. I … I am coming. I am coming right now.”

She gets her feet on the ground, bends at almost a right angle, and pushes herself slowly away from the sofa. She carefully pulls down her sweater, straightens her shoulders, and holds out her hand to her new friend.

“It has been nice talk … talking with you, Bri … Brianna Jones. I am … I should say, I am very glad to have made your acquaintance.”

Brianna returns the formality. “And yours as well, Judith. I hope we see each other again in the future.”

This delights Judy to no end.

“Yes, perhaps on … on another occasion.”

Since this exchange has no guaranteed ending point, I take Judy by the hand and we head out the door.