The Edith Wharton Murders Read online

  “I know.” She nodded sympathetically. “I know. Everyone will expect you to do the work, while they get the credit, or get laid.” Her eye brows rose. “Or even both,” she said thoughtfully.

  “But you don’t understand how terrible it is. You can’t have a Wharton conference—you can’t even have a Wharton panel—with both groups. They despise each other.”

  “On general principles? Or is there a history?”

  I shrugged helplessly. It was too awful to discuss right then.

  Serena ran a finger along her eyebrow as if coaxing an idea into light. “Can’t you be the one to bring them together?”

  “Listen, even Mother Teresa wouldn’t try. It’s like—it’s like matter and antimatter. No—imagine Pat Robertson on a date with Madonna.”

  “Goody,” Serena threw off. “Just what the university needs. Academic mayhem.”

  I shook my head.

  “You should go right home,” Serena advised, “slap a cold compress on your forehead, and lie down quietly in the dark.”

  Just then, Coral Greathouse bustled back into the room. “Nick, I think you should know that the pressure from the administration, especially Dean Bullerschmidt, is very strong. We have to do something right away. The conference has to take place this spring.”

  “That’s impossible! You can’t put together something that complicated in six or seven months!”

  “But you’ve got the connections,” she said with a grin. “That’s what really matters. And remember, this will look very good when you come up for tenure in a few years, won’t it?”

  She left, and Serena shrugged at me.

  “That was a threat,” I said.

  Serena nodded. “You look like ‘Guernica.’”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Shattered.”

  ON THE SHORT drive home after the meeting that sealed my fate, I felt like I was trapped in one of those dream situations where you suddenly have to go onstage, but you can’t remember your lines, can’t even remember that you’re in a play, have ever been in a play. The lights glare, the audience is hungry, dangerous, ready to humiliate you.

  I felt a slight easing of tension pulling up to our house, which always reassured me. A center-hall brick colonial built in the 1930s, it seemed to offer so much stability, from the pillars flanking the front door to the large and airy rooms filled with our comfortable, overstuffed furniture.

  Stefan, who had gone down to Ann Arbor to visit his father and stepmother, was back, and I almost cheered to see him. Hugging him, I spilled out my bad news, knowing that he would talk about how it had gone with his long-estranged father only when he was ready.

  Stefan was surprised. “They asked you to run a conference?”

  I nodded dumbly.

  “I don’t understand.” He frowned. “Do they want to sabotage it? Don’t they know how scattered you are?”

  I started to laugh. Why is it that someone you love can openly tell you your faults and it seems funny, affectionate? Stefan knew I was one of the least organized people in the world, but I didn’t mind him pointing it out.

  We moved to the kitchen, where Stefan was preparing pasta puttanesca for dinner. A bottle of pinot grigio stood ready on the kitchen table, which was already set with pasta bowls and freshly grated Romano in a glass dish.

  “Think of it,” he said, mashing the garlic cloves, olive oil, and anchovies into a paste in the saucepan. “You could lose all the registration forms.” I began to perk up. “Or invite Eudora Welty scholars by mistake—same initials, right? EW.”

  I slumped. “I wish we lived near a volcano. That would make people think twice about coming.”

  Stefan added capers, chopped black olives, and seeded plum tomatoes to the simmering pan, and stirred. “Are you kidding? Nick, you know what academics are like. Nothing would stop them from a tax write-off and time away from their classes.”

  “And Wharton people are the worst now that Wharton’s so popular. they think it’ll rub off.”

  Stefan nodded, checking the pan. It already smelled wonderful. He reduced the heat. “Basil tomato penne or spinach linguine?” he asked, putting up a pot of water to boil.

  Is there anything better than a good meal prepared by a loving chef?

  “The linguine. Spinach worked for Popeye.”

  “Why don’t we sit down after dinner,” Stefan said gently, “and start making some plans for the conference?”

  “Why don’t we call Dr. Kevorkian and have him put me out of my misery while I still have the chance?”

  Part One

  “…her name had so long been public property…”

  —Edith Wharton, The Touchstone

  1

  I THINK I should warn you,” I said, looking up from the layout of the Wharton conference schedule. “My previous office mate was murdered.”

  I didn’t intend to say that to Bob Gillian the first January day we were both in our office that second semester. It just popped out. I do that a lot. I’ll say something out of place just because the moment calls for the opposite. I guess you could call me quip happy.

  Maybe it was a genetic mutation. My Belgian Jewish parents shared the French love of le mot juste; in me, it had degenerated into ill-timed wisecracking, or what my mother austerely called my bêtises.

  Though Gillian’s books, files, and Seurat posters had been unpacked, shelved, and hung before the second semester started a week before, I’d only seen the man himself in passing. I liked the posters, especially the one of La Grande Jatte, my favorite painting at Chicago’s Art Institute.

  I should have said something friendly and welcoming as he sat down at his desk opposite mine. But I was nervous. Gillian’s wife, Joanne, was on the State University of Michigan’s Board of Trustees. A local minister with her own church, she was an extremist given to frequent denunciations of “the gay lifestyle,” and just the week before had declared that gays and lesbians at SUM were “unfit role models for our youth—just like devil worshipers, cannibals, and communists.” She was a close friend of our conservative governor and there were rumors she was being groomed for state office. She was also running the university, since the current president—SUM’s former football coach Webb Littleterry—was only a figurehead.

  “Don’t worry,” Bob Gillian threw off, swinging around in his creaky desk chair. “I know all about what happened last year to your office mate, so I’ve already registered for a self-defense course and my will’s up to date in case that’s a bust.”

  And then Gillian smiled with the showy insouciance of a magician whooshing a tablecloth out from a fully set table without stirring a single candlestick, fork, or glass. In his mid-fifties, he was small, slight, and blond, bearing himself like a model, and his blue eyes, ruddy complexion, and thick wavy hair seemed like jaunty slogans in a successful ad campaign.

  I smiled back. At least he had a sense of humor. And that made him more entertaining than Perry Cross, my previous office mate, who had plagued me more in death than in the brief time last year we had shared an office there in Parker Hall at SUM’s Michiganapolis campus.

  “I’ve been spoiled,” I said to Bob. “I’ve had this place all to myself for over half a year.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Nobody wanted to share an office with me, given what happened to my last office mate.”

  “But you didn’t kill him, right? So it’s not like you’re dangerous.”

  “Maybe they think I’m cursed, or the office is.”

  Bob nodded. “That’s it, then. Superstition. Bad vibes.”

  “Hey—in our department, bad vibes are the norm.”

  “I can see that,” he said, looking around the office. “This place sucks. I used to have a great little office. It was modern—it was air-conditioned—it was clean.”

  I could understand his letdown. The large office we were sharing was dark and gloomy, with wide-paned windows that rattled in the slightest breeze and were going crazy now in
the winter wind; lots of oddly shaped exposed pipes; and a bewilderingly high ceiling that might have made sense if there was a fresco instead of flaking cracks. Over every thing, there was that shabby, unpainted, uncared-for look of a department that the university doesn’t take much notice of.

  As for the rest of the building…. The floors in Parker Hall buckled, the walls and ceilings were cracked and bulging, the place reeked of bug spray that didn’t seem to faze the heroic squadrons of waterbugs, and the weathered sandstone itself looked ready to deliquesce.

  Bob went on: “Well, I’m sorry you didn’t get to keep your privacy. I bet it was like being a freshman in a dorm and hoping you’d luck out and wouldn’t get a roommate.”

  “Exactly! It wasn’t much, but it was mine. I think we’ll get along okay, though.”

  Bob shrugged genially. “We don’t have much choice, do we?”

  To change the subject a little, I said, “It must have been a bitch when the old provost shut your department down.”

  He shrugged again. “You know how it is. The administrators make speeches about how important freshman writing is, how dedicated we are as an institution, blah blah blah. Then they close the Writing Lab. Why? To save money. How much money do you really save by getting rid of the secretaries and the director? If they want to save big bucks they should dump half the paper pushers over in the Administration Building, those turkeys making over a hundred thousand a year. This place is top-heavy with those slugs.”

  Bob shook his head, and I admired his composure. He sounded less like a faculty member who’d been shafted and more like an ironic news commentator, pointing out social or political foibles that didn’t touch him directly.

  I would have understood angrier discontent. After two decades of working in the Writing Lab, he’d been cast adrift, washing ashore in EAR. Teaching composition for us, he was now at the very bottom of the pile, where before he’d had seniority and respect in his own unit. I taught comp, too, but I enjoyed it, and besides, Stefan was EAR’s writer-in-residence, so I shared some of his status.

  Bob Gillian certainly seemed very out of place in this shabby department. He was aristocratic-looking and as relaxed and offhand as someone whose private income had allowed him to follow teaching as a hobby. Maybe that was the truth, because his tweed jacket, his loafers and cords, his argyle sweater vest and blue buttoned-down shirt all looked very expensive. He drove a gorgeous if slightly battered old Jaguar, a car I imagined he was so sentimentally attached to that he would never sell it. When he’d come into the office, he’d dramatically peel off his expensive-looking driving gloves as if he were a clashing RAF pilot who’d just shot down a few German planes. Clearly, he loved to drive that car and wanted people to know it.

  I was puzzled that being married to someone on the Board of Trustees hadn’t protected Bob, hadn’t yielded him a high-paying sinecure of some kind. Maybe that accounted for his trashing the administrators at SUM: he was angry he wasn’t one of them. Just as I was trying to think of a subtle way to raise all that, Priscilla Davidoff strode from her office across the hall and knocked fiercely on our open door.

  “Nick! You won’t believe this.” She brandished a glossy magazine at me. I could just make out that the text was not in English.

  “What’s wrong?”

  Priscilla hesitated, and I assumed it was something she didn’t want Gillian to hear.

  “Your office?” I asked, and she nodded.

  I followed Priscilla back across the hall into her plant-filled, richly carpeted office, where every chair was comfortable and inviting. In a building that was cracked, dirty, scarred, and ignored by the university because it housed departments that brought in little money, her office was a refuge: bright, fragrant, appealing. Maybe she’d ordered too many Bombay Company doodads and had overdone the potpourri pots, but I suppose that was her way to fight being ground down by Parker Hall’s decades of neglect and decay.

  Closing the door and lowering her voice, Priscilla said, “Doesn’t Bob Gillian make your skin crawl? And his wife is the ultimate Christian Bitch. She’s Anita Bryant on crack. The two of them make me sick—they’re evil.”

  Priscilla’s hyperbole bothered me. Since our enemies demonized us, I didn’t think it was appropriate to sink to their level.

  “Listen, I’m trying not to let that get to me,” I said. “I have to share an office with him, right?”

  “But all the stuff Joanne Gillian says about us, how we’re sick, how SUM could never give us domestic partner benefits because that would undermine the American family, how it would send a message to students that anything goes at this university, even bestiality—doesn’t that make you crazy?”

  “Of course it does! But it won’t help if I treat her husband like shit, will it? Maybe getting to know someone gay will help—”

  Quietly, Priscilla cut me off. “Listen, Nick. That won’t make any difference at all. Before you and Stefan got here, gay and lesbian faculty met with upper-level administrators in an advisory group for five years. And I chaired the Task Force on Lesbian and Gay Equality at SUM. We gathered research, had a conference, presented our findings, and this administration still hasn’t done a thing. No domestic partner benefits, no gay studies major, no gay/lesbian coordinator. Nothing we recommended. They got to know plenty of us, but it hasn’t made a difference. Even if we slept with them, nothing would change!”

  “Well, I know what the problem is. Reports and advisory groups are a complete waste of time. The only way you can change things at this university for gays and lesbians is to seize the Administration Building and take hostages.” I added, “And give them all fashion makeovers.”

  Priscilla grinned.

  “Now, what’s going on?” I asked. “You didn’t come into my office just to remind me SUM’s homophobic, did you?”

  She flushed. “Look.” She shoved the magazine she’d been holding at me, and I could see where her name was circled in red, the English spelling like a tiny bare island in a churning arctic sea of—what?—Swedish? Danish? I couldn’t tell.

  I sat by her desk; she thunked into her chair and slammed down the magazine as if she were a bailiff commanding the court to rise. Tall, dark-haired, and as striking as Geena Davis, she wore black boots and jeans and a heavy black cowl-neck sweater, with her hair in a ponytail. Despite her dramatic looks, Priscilla was ordinarily somewhat placid, even at department meetings where people’s eccentricities tended to bubble over.

  I had never seen Priscilla looking so furious. She was red, wide-eyed, tight-mouthed. But it was not a rage that sealed her off, because I some how felt included, as if she were recruiting me to a cause.

  “This,” she spat, “is an interview in a Hungarian magazine—a Hungarian magazine!—with Chloe DeVore.” She let the name quiver in the air between us as if it were a challenge to a duel. DeVore was a prominent bisexual writer whose work I didn’t enjoy, but who was widely read and admired. It seemed clear that her popularity was a curse for writers like Priscilla, because the literary establishment didn’t seem willing to praise more than one lesbian (or half-lesbian?) writer at a time. DeVore was it, and scarfed up the good reviews, the six-figure advances, the guest teaching positions, the awards and grants, the spots in anthologies, the TV appearances, the unctuous interviewers.

  “And right in the middle of some comment about contemporary American literature,” Priscilla went on, “she trashes me.”

  “How?”

  Priscilla’s eyes narrowed. “She says my work is artless.”

  I hesitated. “You’re sure that isn’t a compliment? I mean, like maybe she’s saying you’re not artificial, maybe she means easy, free, natural…?”

  Priscilla shook her head. “I was hoping that, but the woman interviewing her—Sophia, Sophia Nemeth—sent it to me. And Sophia’s note said it was clear Chloe didn’t like my writing. ‘Artless’ definitely means without art, lacking art, having no art, not artistic—” She faltered.

  Before I
could ask about the translation, Priscilla said, “I know someone in the Russian Department who’s fairly fluent in Hungarian. I checked with him to make sure.”

  I nodded. “Have you ever met Chloe?”

  Now Priscilla reared back. “You’re trying to tell me it’s personal?”

  “No.” I shrugged. “I just wondered.”

  Since I lived with a writer who was prey to bad reviews, late-night doubts, troubles with his editor, frustrations with his publisher’s publicity department, and his own perpetually escalating set of expectations, the situation was very familiar. I’d learned the hard way that listening to an outraged or dispirited writer, whatever the cause, you have to be patient, soothing but not smarmy, and prepared to agree with the wildest assumptions, fantasies, and fears.

  Anything else can lead to a blowup.

  Eventually, you can move to a more tranquil place, but trying to calm them down too quickly—or even disagreeing—is a bitter mistake. Humor can also be useful—in moderate amounts.

  “Priscilla,” I began, “Hungarian isn’t even an Indo-European language.”

  That threw her, and frowning, she put the magazine down on her neatly arranged wide desk as if she might need both hands free to deal with me. “What?”

  “I mean, jeez, its closest linguistic links in Europe are Finnish and Estonian. It’s not like this is an interview in French or German. How many Hungarians are there, anyway? How many would read this magazine, or read as far as your name, or even care if they did? What’s the worst thing that can happen? Your name is mud in Budapest?”

  Priscilla smiled wanly. Then she shrugged and shook her head. “I feel like I’m in junior high and I just found out people are gossiping about me, saying something terrible.”

  I nodded, remembering how awful that could be.

  She leaned forward. “No—worse! Like third grade, and kids are saying your lunch box smells, when it doesn’t! It makes me feel paranoid, and helpless. What’s she have to attack me for? I’ve never reviewed her work, I’ve never said anything bad about her.” Eyes down, she added quietly, “In public.”