Читать книгу Every Wickedness - Susan Thistlethwaite - Страница 14

You have no heart

You make me sick

You’re a robot

Not a person

You took away my mother

In your van

She looked back at me

Crying

“ICE-Y Hearts”

Valerie Hernandez, #998

StreetWise

Thursday, May 18, 8:45 a.m.

I clumped up the three flights of stairs of Myerson Hall to our offices and classrooms. Our medieval-style building was gray stone with turrets holding down the four corners. Philosophy and Religion had one side of this top floor, history had the other. Academic backwaters, both relegated to ancient and unrenovated buildings. The elevators never worked.

The faculty office door was open when I entered our corridor. Good. Maybe that meant our faculty secretary, Mary Frost, was out.

I cautiously stuck my head through the door. The office seemed empty. I could grab my snail mail and get going. But as I moved further into the room, Mary backed out of the closet in the far corner carrying a stack of large manila envelopes. Her thin, elderly face was flushed even with this small effort.

“Professor Ginelli. Good morning. How are you this morning? Can I get you some tea? I brought some Lapsang Souchong from home and it’s still quite hot.”

All of this was said in a rushed, whispery tone as she bustled over to her desk. She placed the stack of envelopes hurriedly on top of an already precarious stack of papers and reached for a paper-thin teacup next to the stack that would be crushed if the pile slid that way. As she picked it up, the delicate china cup rattled on its saucer. She literally jumped at the sound and put it back down. She placed both trembling hands around a shining, stainless steel thermos that was next to her computer, more to still them, I thought, than to get me any actual tea.

This is what I had been trying, coward that I am, to avoid. Mary Frost had been the faculty secretary for Philosophy and Religion for more than twenty years. She’d had a breakdown, what she referred to as a ‘spell,’ when our former department chair, Harold Grimes, had died and his various misdeeds had come to light. I’d always thought Mary had idolized her old boss and yet her almost collapse had seemed extreme. I had often wondered if she’d also been a victim of his misdeeds, or perhaps a silent witness. She’d been given medical leave until the middle of April and then had returned to work. Astonishingly, given the role I’d had in exposing her old boss, she had switched her devotion from him to me. It was so unnerving.

“No, thanks, Mary. That’s the good stuff. I’ll just have some coffee if there is any left down the hall.” I mumbled this while shoveling into my backpack the amazing amount of paper that still accumulated in my mailbox despite the advent of the digital age. I hefted it and turned to look at Mary. She was bent over the messy piles of paper and files that six months ago would have appalled her; she was simply moving papers from one stack to another.

“Well,” she said in that whispery rushed voice, “you know best, though coffee is bad for the heart. I just read an article on that. In fact I have it right here,” she said as she rummaged around even faster, going through one of the piles. The pale May sunshine from the window behind her shone through her thinning gray hair and piteously illuminated her pink scalp. I stood helplessly watching her shuffle papers, now unwilling to leave her and just walk out.

“Lose something, Mary?” A robust voice coming from the doorway was both brisk and yet held an undertone of compassion.

My boss, Dr. Adelaide Winters, newly appointed department chairperson, came into the office. She glanced sharply at me and I jumped in as bid.

“Mary has an article she wants me to read, on how coffee is bad for you. But just now she can’t seem to locate it.” Mary continued shuffling papers, seeming oblivious now to both of us.

Adelaide might have been a large woman, but she was always quick on her feet and she swiftly reached Mary’s side, putting one of her soft hands over the thin, restless ones—delicately stilling their motion.

“I’m sure that article is excellent, but right now I need something copied,” she said briskly. I had also noticed that Mary spent a lot of time standing over the copier, watching its rhythmic flash. It did seem to calm her.

Mary’s watery blue eyes looked up from the desktop and seemed to focus. She suddenly jerked her hands out from under Adelaide’s. She grabbed at the file that Adelaide was holding in her other hand.

“Fine, Dr. Winters,” she snapped. “How many copies?”

I never thought I’d be glad to see a glimpse of the old bitchy Mary, but I was. The snap of her eyes and frigid tone was a frank relief, much to be preferred to the delicate wraith that moved around the office with no seeming purpose. That glance and tone used to be called ‘getting frosted’ by the students and faculty alike. We all used to tiptoe past her office trying not to draw her attention. Now we still tiptoed by, but for very different reasons.

Frost did not like it one bit that Adelaide had replaced her old boss, but her anger at Adelaide seemed to wake her up.

Adelaide knew this, of course, and used it to try to bring Frost around. She kept her Mrs. Claus face on, the one that fooled people into thinking that her halo of graying hair and her round face meant she was a sweet older lady. Adelaide was far more likely to give you a verbal kick in the pants than a cookie, however. She was probably counting on Mary’s animosity to snap her out of the repetitive behavior.

“Twenty-five,” Adelaide snapped back, matching Mary’s tone. “By 11 o’clock.”

“You’ll have them by 9:30,” Mary said with a trace of her former asperity, her frame erect in the faded floral dress that now hung on her thin frame. She walked steadily over to the copier, keeping her back ramrod straight. Once Mary’s back was turned, Adelaide allowed her concern to show on her face, and then she took my arm and hustled me out the door.

By unspoken consent we went down the hall toward her office. She had set up a table with a De’Longhi combination coffee/espresso machine on a table in the hall outside her door. Ground the beans and everything. I had one at home. Adelaide was clearly leading us in a new direction, a place where faculty and students all had access to good coffee. I put my money in the donation jar and made a cup of espresso. Adelaide did the same. Then we walked into her office. In contrast to the former occupant, who always kept his door shut and often even locked, doing God-knows-what behind that closed door, she almost always kept her door open.

“What is it about me that sets her off?” I asked as we sat down. Even to my ears I sounded like I was whining. But Mary’s condition rattled me.

“Kid, who knows? Whatever her affection for the old bastard was based on, I have come to think there was a healthy dose of hatred there too.” Well, Adelaide should know. She had good reasons to have thoroughly hated our departed and unlamented department chair as well.

“At some level,” she said, pausing to take a sip of the really excellent espresso, “she must be glad he’s dead and you are St. George, the hero. The dragon slayer. But me? I’m the replacement for the love object, so she hates me.”

I narrowed my eyes and glared at her.

“Did you talk this over with Willie?” Donald Willie was our colleague in Psychology and Religion and I thought he was a superficial idiot.

Adelaide chuckled.

“Not even close. No, you know there’s a lot of myths about conflict that feminists use to dive into the origins of patriarchy. My own psychological brew, if you will. No point in teaching Women and Religion if you don’t actually believe the stuff. Don’t worry about it. I think she’s beginning to realize she needs to retire this summer.”

She patted me on the back with her free hand as she said this, causing me to nearly spill my coffee. She calmly steadied my arm and then seemed to take a hard look at me in the process.

“Say, what’s with the cheerful black ensemble? Halloween is in October and this is May.”

Her shrewd eyes seemed to take in my washed out face and limp hair as well.

I gulped down the rest of the coffee and said, “Let me just put my head into my class and let Hercules know I’ll be late. I’ll be right back. I think you need to know what happened last night before you hear it from somebody else.”

Hercules Abraham, already retired Professor of Judaism who taught for us part-time, was team teaching the class with me. Or rather, I was learning a ton from Hercules and so were the students.

After I got back, I gave her a quick run-through of what had happened. I described the reception, Tom’s and my private tour up to the floor where the operating suites would be, hearing the thud and the cry, our trying to rescue her, and then the tragic end result. I described the young woman, whom I now thought of as the victim, as I had seen her at the reception. Her long blonde hair, her supermodel figure, her tight, determined face. And then her waxed features above the blanket on the hospital gurney as I’d last seen her. I couldn’t help but shudder once again at what it might feel like to drown in concrete.

Adelaide frowned. “You said the name was Courtney Carlyle?”

“Well, that’s the name the doctor who was her date gave the police. She had no identification and I suppose her purse is now encased in several tons of hardened concrete.”

“I wonder if that’s Karen Carlyle? She insisted people call her Courtney.”

Adelaide got up abruptly and walked over to gaze out the window behind her desk.

“You think you knew her?” I asked, amazed. “How?”

She spoke almost absently, without turning around.

“Well, if it’s the same young woman, she was a student here and she took my ‘History of Feminist Theory’ class last year. She was very distinctive looking, pretty much just as you’ve described. And, as I said, she insisted she be called Courtney instead of Karen.” Adelaide turned, put down her coffee cup on the desk, and moved slowly, almost reluctantly to her computer.

“Let me just pull my records and notes up.”

Tempted as I was to follow this up right now, I really needed to get to my class.

“Listen, Adelaide, I need to go. Can we meet after? Go over the records?”

She spoke without looking up from the screen.

“Sure. Here. After class.” And she kept staring at the screen.

Student? If Courtney Carlyle the doctor’s date was Karen Carlyle the undergraduate we had to get that information to help the investigation into her death. My curiosity was so strong I had to force myself out of Adelaide’s office and hurry down the hall to the seminar room.

# # # #

I slowed down as I reached the classroom door. I could hear voices and I didn’t want to interrupt the discussion more than my tardy entrance would already do. I entered quietly and navigated around the backpacks littering the floor by the students’ seats around the seminar table. I took a chair next to Hercules.

He had stopped speaking as soon as he’d seen me enter, however. Naturally he did. He was far too polite to keep talking while I entered.

Hercules was over 80, but you’d never know it. He was small and wiry, a French Jew who, as a young child during World War II, had been hidden from the Nazis in a small town in France with his mother. He taught Jewish studies and was a well-known scholar of the Talmud. He had approached me with the idea for this course, and even though we were understaffed this spring (I’d moved to part-time, we’d had one resignation plus the death of our department chair and another colleague, Donald Willie, the Religion and Psychology guy, was on sabbatical), Adelaide had agreed. She said it would be good for both of us. I didn’t know what it was doing for Hercules to teach with me, but I know it was helping me in ways I didn’t even know I needed. Plus, I adored him.

Hercules spoke gently as I wrestled my tablet out of my backpack.

“My dear—you take a moment. The time is only just at the 9. Begin when you are ready.”

Since it was already more like a quarter past, I appreciated the sentiment. I opened the tablet and scrolled to the lecture notes I’d prepared last week. That was pretty much a record for me as a new teacher. Usually I was just hours ahead of the students in terms of class prep. But I loved the current topic and the book we were using, a modern interpretation of Aristotle called The Fragility of Goodness. Well, that was right. Goodness was fragile and a big part of that was the fragility of human life. I glanced down at my carefully prepared notes and shut the tablet.

“Last night I had the misfortune to watch someone young die.”

Coffee cups were put down abruptly, hands stilled over notebooks and laptops. There was one soft exhalation from a young woman on my right. Fair-haired and slight, her name was Karen. The name jarred me. The other Karen who liked to be called Courtney might have sat in this room just last year.

Several of the students wouldn’t meet my eyes. I could hear their silent protests. This was philosophy, for Pete’s sake. Why all this reality so early in the morning? This course met a distribution requirement for the Humanities Division, so we were blessed with the appearance of several science majors who clearly conveyed they were going through the motions. Well, no ‘going through the motions’ would work this morning.

“You felt pain when I said that, didn’t you?” I looked at each person around the table, one at a time, waiting until she or he made eye contact. It took a while, but it was worth the time. No holding back here.

“So feeling that pain also makes it possible for you to know that love, commitment, and, in fact, being in a relationship are good things. You know that’s good because you also feel bad about loss, maybe even the loss of someone young whom you didn’t know. But it’s loss, it’s real.”

One hand rose slowly. Isabelle Oliveira, an international student from Brazil. Second year science major.

“I didn’t understand this reading on Aristotle at all. I thought after last week that we’d said pain and loss were the definition of evil from that other reading. Now we’re supposed to think they’re part of good?”

Her voice gained in strength as she voiced her grievance. Science majors thought definitions should hold up, not be offered one week and then unsettled again the next week.

Beside me Hercules lowered his chin to let his mustache hide his smile. Unsettled questions and ambiguity were his philosophy of life.

I glanced around the room, still trying to hold eye contact. It was heavy going.

“Anybody care to take a crack at answering Isabelle’s question? The reading we had last week from Nel Noddings did say pain and loss define evil. So how can they also be part of good according to Aristotle? Do these thinkers disagree or is there a way these ideas can go together?”

I primed the pump a little by giving them the name of the author of last week’s reading. Smart they might be, but in a school where the sciences and economics held supreme, philosophy came way down the list of things that needed to get read. They looked at their computer screens, or down at their backpacks contemplating whether they’d even brought that book from last week along (probably not) or they just took a sip of coffee. One student blew his nose in a wad of tissue.

They weren’t going for it. Teaching can be threatening to one’s self-esteem. I felt like a feminist stand-up comedian trying to get a bunch of Christian fundamentalists to laugh at her jokes about patriarchy.

The key is to wait.

Finally a large hand went up at the far end of the seminar table. Edwin Porterman, African American, six and a half feet tall, a brilliant economist. Edwin had one of the few athletic scholarships at this school, playing football to keep himself debt free. I’d met him in the fall. Playing on our Division III football team seemed not to tax him at all, and he was a straight A student in this university’s challenging economics department. He must also have a campus job to earn extra money. I suddenly remembered he’d been one of the student workers helping to pass the canapés at the reception last night.

This class filled no distribution requirement for Edwin. He’d signed up at the beginning of this term as an audit. Edwin and I had a history. I’d been useful in preventing him from being accused of murder. But there was more about ‘Good and Evil’ that he was clearly working out in his own mind from the events of the fall. As I saw his serious brown eyes fixed steadily on me and Hercules each week, I wondered how he was doing with that self-imposed task. Edwin did nothing without deliberation.

I nodded at him and his measured voice rumbled out over the class.

“Aristotle and Noddings aren’t disagreeing. They’re saying that good is connected to evil and vice versa. The Stoics in Aristotle’s time were saying you had to avoid all attachments to achieve happiness, because attachments bring pain. Aristotle said, ‘right,’ but attachments are also how you can know happiness. There’s no ducking it.”

He placed his large hands with their long, graceful fingers on top of the Fragility of Goodness book.

“This here is a philosophy of what life is really like—damned if you do, damned if you don’t.” His hands moved to grip the book as he ground out these words.

The other students stared. Not only pain but passion in the classroom. This was going from bad to worse. Physics did not normally include a punch to the solar plexus. And Edwin was the only African American in the class. Most of them tried to disguise it, but they were afraid of him, well indoctrinated by the drumbeat of white supremacy in this country. But they were also intimidated by his brilliance. Some of them probably secretly wanted to see his birth certificate.

The waves of discomfort that went around the room were nearly visible like heat in the desert.

Into the silence, a gentle voice spoke.

“Is this our damnation as humans, or is it our only salvation?” Hercules asked, easing the tension caused by their fears.

“If I cannot feel, am I not already a dead person, a thing of no passions?” His softly accented voice still had no trouble carrying around the whole room.

Hercules stood and walked unhurriedly to the other end of the seminar table where Edwin sat. He put a thin, parchment-colored hand down by Edwin’s big brown one on the top of the book. He waited, their two hands resting side-by-side, liver spots and wrinkles next to dark youth and strength.

“Here is difference, and here is the same. Blood, muscles, nerves, same pain, same pleasure. Look carefully please.” He paused, every eye on him and Edwin. I was holding my breath. I knew I was not the only one.

“When I do not see the same, only the different, I lose my own humanity. When I make a friend,” here he slowly grasped Edwin’s hand and shook it, “my life becomes richer. I have the good of friendship. But good is not without risk, because my friend is different from me. But that is also a pleasure.”

I would give a lot to become the kind of teacher that makes the classroom a real place. I met Hercules’s eyes down the length of the seminar table. Under his bushy white eyebrows, a brown eye winked at me. I laughed aloud with pleasure in this friendship. The students looked at us like we were crazy. All except Edwin. He shook Hercules’s hand back so vigorously that the little man’s whole frame moved up and down.

But the ice was broken. Hands rose all around the room. Friendship as both pleasure and pain is something young people trying to live in community are deeply concerned about.