The Edith Wharton Murders Read online

  2

  “CYNTHIA OZICK CANCELED!”

  Stefan rolled over in bed next to me while I tried to keep the phone from slipping into the covers from my sleep-heavy hand. “What?” I couldn’t even remember hearing it ring, or having picked it up. I vaguely thought the radio alarm had come on, but it was Sunday, wasn’t it? We should have been sleeping in—and when I made out the digital clock face, it read 8:15 a.m.

  Stefan groaned and pulled a pillow over his head.

  “Are you there? Nick? Nick?” It was Priscilla calling.

  “I’m here. Let me switch phones.” I found my robe on the floor, slipped it on and stumbled downstairs to my study, my feet cold, lifted up the receiver, and then went back to hang up the bedroom phone. Lucky Stefan was already snoring.

  “This is horrendous,” Priscilla moaned when I was finally on the line, and I felt she’d been talking into the phone even though I wasn’t there.

  I tried repeating her first comment, “Cynthia Ozick cancelled,” hoping that would rub the magic lamp of our conversation.

  “The President’s Series.”

  It clicked. Once a year, a prominent author came to campus to speak and read. Ozick was due in a few weeks. She’d been invited because of a petition by women faculty to SUM’s president to have more notable women speakers come to campus so as to “dynamite the rhetorical patriarchy” or something like that. It was part of a large drive to change the visibility of women on campus, which was also why EAR was hosting the Edith Wharton conference I was running.

  But I didn’t understand why I had to know that Cynthia Ozick wasn’t coming, and why I had to know it so early on a Sunday morning.

  “The provost just called me. He was so excited! They’re bringing in Chloe DeVore!”

  “Wait. She’s not Jewish,” I had to point out. “I mean, if they’re trying to replace Ozick….”

  Priscilla made an evil kind of sound that was part chuckle, part sneer. “You know how those administrators think—a minority’s a minority. Woman, lesbian, Jewish, it’s all the same.”

  “Don’t tell that to Cynthia Ozick,” I said. “I don’t think she’d enjoy the company.”

  Priscilla’s voice rose. “Chloe won’t care! She’s getting ten thousand dollars!”

  I heard a faint ringing on Priscilla’s end. “Oh, God, that’s my fax,” she moaned. And then her call waiting clicked in, so I let her go.

  When I turned from the phone, Stefan was in the doorway, wearing his white silk pajama bottoms, and I felt immeasurably cheered up and awake. It doesn’t matter how little sleep he’s had—he always looks gorgeous in the morning. His dark, thick, curly hair can be parted any where or not at all, his skin looks taut and young, and though he may hunch over his breakfast and his morning paper, there’s an aliveness in his muscular body that I envy and admire. He looked right now like one of those ruggedly handsome men you see in soap commercials, accessorized by a cute baby.

  “What’s happening?”

  I told him to sit down, and I went to make some coffee. With the Royal Kona brewing, I explained everything that Priscilla had told me, while Stefan idly scratched his hairy chest, his arms, his shoulders, as if massaging himself more awake. During my recital, he nodded, closed his eyes in thought now and then, said, “Hunh” occasionally, but didn’t interrupt.

  “I’m surprised nobody asked for my recommendation,” he said, sipping from his cup.

  “Jeez, you’re right.” He was, after all, the writer-in-residence at SUM. But Stefan shrugged that off; he didn’t like holding unnecessary grudges. And he wasn’t at all concerned with status. That’s why I let the matter drop—it wouldn’t have done either of us any good for me to play a nagging Ann Baxter to his Yul Brynner as Pharaoh.

  But I did start bitching about Chloe’s enormous speaking fee. “She does not need ten thousand dollars.”

  Stefan laughed. “Who’re you kidding? Everybody needs ten thousand dollars.”

  “But look at the writers they’ve brought in before! Toni Morrison. Jane Smiley. Philip Roth. Would you put Chloe DeVore in their category, either of talent or fame?”

  “She is now.”

  “How can you be so calm about it?”

  “Why are you freaked out? It makes sense that Priscilla is, but—”

  “Because Chloe DeVore is one of the most overrated writers of the decade, and you know it. Because she gets reviews she doesn’t deserve, because she’s a star, because she’s arrogant and believes her own press releases, because she’s locked into the literary world like you’ll never be and it makes me sick. It’s disgusting—like watching a dog lick its behind.”

  Smiling gently, Stefan said, “She’ll be taking questions when she’s here. Why don’t you ask her about some of that?”

  I finished my coffee.

  We had a lot of work that Sunday—picking up all the fallen branches that had been covered by snow until the previous day’s sunshine—and I welcomed the release into physical concentration that blurred time and feeling. From time to time, I thought of Chloe DeVore coming to campus, and of the previous famous writers I’d heard here and at other schools. They were all both exciting and disappointing. Charming and witty, of course—and who wouldn’t be, getting ten thousand dollars or more for a few hours’ work?

  Part of the excitement was simply hearing the author’s words in his or her own voice, and storing that voice for encounters with their future books. Yet with each author, no matter how kind they seemed, you had the distinct impression that they were hiding their cruelly funny perceptions of your university, images and scenes that would crop up in one book or another. Talking to a writer like that left me intensely self-conscious. I’m sure others felt the same sort of embarrassment, which probably made the experience somewhat dull for the visiting celebrity. Last year at SUM, Philip Roth had looked out at us during the question-and-answer session like a bemused, dyspeptic hawk who finds nothing worth pouncing on. Even the self-styled provocative questions were clearly nothing new for him.

  And when Stefan, a longtime fan, had handed Roth his card, hoping they might begin a correspondence, he was crushed by Roth’s quietly withering comment, “I’ve never met a writer with a business card.”

  I told Stefan I wouldn’t read anything of Roth’s again after that, but Stefan didn’t comment.

  Stefan and I made steak Diane for dinner, with twice-baked potatoes, and watched Laura for probably the tenth time, as always hooting with delight when Judith Anderson says of Vincent Price, “He’s no good—but he’s what I want.”

  STEFAN’S EQUANIMITY ABOUT Chloe’s upcoming campus visit did not last much past the weekend, because we got the word through Coral Greathouse that we had been chosen by President Littleterry to host the after-reading reception for Chloe.

  Usually, these receptions were held at the president’s campus mansion, which had been donated by a Ford relative in the 1920s after the original burned down during a homecoming parade. At the old center of campus, amid buildings dating back to the mid- and late 1800s, it was an impressive sprawling stone house with porte-cochère, curving graveled drive, stone lions at the door, geranium-filled urns filing up the wide steps to the porch. Plopped in the center of campus, the house had the air of a movie set, and even inside, you kept wanting to touch walls to see how substantial they really were.

  Apparently, it was deemed “more suitable” to have Chloe entertained at our house. Not a surprising line of thought, given that SUM’s new president was its former football coach. And that since he was under Joanne Gillian’s thumb, he didn’t want to be publicly associated with Chloe, however much good publicity her presence might yield.

  Stefan blew up. At me. “Because Chloe’s a dyke! That’s why! They’ll bring her in, but they don’t want her dining on campus—that’s too much. So they dump her on the fags! Keep it all in the ghetto! And how the hell are we supposed to handle this and the Wharton conference?”

  Stefan went on, storming ar
ound the living room, shouting his objections at the furniture. I watched him, feeling dazed detachment and lots of affection. With quiet people, it’s sometimes scary when they lose their tempers, but it’s also reassuring to know that rage is in there, somewhere.

  I did not point out that Chloe DeVore was—according to her publicity—a bisexual, and not a lesbian. Or that actually I was the one handling the conference, and he was handling my hysteria. It didn’t seem the right time for those finer distinctions.

  Stefan eventually simmered down, and asked who we should hire to cater the party, because he refused to do any of the work, and I agreed.

  I suppose I should have been stunned or outraged, but I felt disconnected from the whole situation. I was drifting along with the same sense of doomed detachment I had felt since the Edith Wharton conference had gotten started in the fall.

  Stefan had been warm and sympathetic about the conference, but it was Serena who came to my rescue. Out of pity, she had quietly offered to run the conference for me, but only if I was the sole contact person. She’d arrange for the meeting rooms, the meals, the block of rooms at the campus center hotel, arrange for the calls to submit papers, find out about having the programs and name tags printed, and every other detail except selecting the papers. “But I don’t want any publicity!” she said.

  I was somewhat surprised by her generosity. After all, last year she realized that I’d suspected her of murder, and we hadn’t exactly been collegial since then. But I was too desperate to question her motives. Even with her help, though, the flood of phone calls, queries, faxes, E-mail that only I could deal with had been stupefying.

  The first call had come from Van Deegan Jones, president of the conservative-leaning Edith Wharton Association. He taught at Emory, and depending on whether you liked him or not, he was either pompous or magisterial. I found him stuffy—which I suppose put me somewhere in the middle.

  “Nick, how are you?”

  I was grading papers in my office when Jones called, and I told him so.

  “Yes, it never ends, does it?” he asked with canned sympathy. It’s the phony benevolence we overworked composition profs get from people like Jones who teach two graduate seminars a semester.

  “Now, tell me, Nick, what’s this I hear about a Wharton conference?”

  He made it sound like it was a rumor, when he and everyone in both Wharton societies had received an announcement calling for the submission of papers.

  “What would you like to know?” I asked in my helpful bibliographer’s voice.

  “You’re not serious,” he said, asperity creeping into his tone. “Both societies? It’s never been done.”

  I hadn’t planned for this call, though I should have. Improvising, I said, “Think of the credit you’ll get.”

  “I? Whatever for?”

  “It’s simple. You’re president of the senior Wharton society. Your presence makes all the difference.” Would he buy it? Hell, I wasn’t sure yet what I was selling.

  “That’s true,” he mused. “But you can’t expect me to talk to those academic hooligans who have absolutely no respect for Mrs. Wharton. They’re bandits, they’re vulgarians, slashing something noble and fine. They loathe literature, and they can’t stand to look up to anyone. They want it all reduced to the lowest common denominator so that Wharton is just another victim, just another suffering woman, when she, she was an artist.”

  I was silent. I began to hope that he might work out how the conference could be used to his advantage.

  He did. “Maybe it’s time to attack them head-on,” Jones said thoughtfully, and I cheered to myself. “To dam the tide of their pernicious nonsense.” He hung up after warning me that I had to make sure things didn’t get “out of hand” at the conference. “I’m not putting up with any crap,” he said, his voice steely, and the unexpected use of even that mildest of swear words shocked me—as I suppose it was intended to do.

  Van Deegan Jones meant business. So did his rival.

  She called a few days later from Harvard. Feisty, sexy Verity Gallup had always struck me as a little too energetic to be an academic. It wasn’t just her last name—she truly seemed more suited for the world of action. Not surprisingly, she got right to the point when she called.

  “I always knew you were one of us!” she crowed. She’d reached me at home. It was late and I was already in bed. “Why didn’t you say so? No, don’t answer that. I know, you have to pretend you’re neutral. You have to pretend you like all that tight-ass, boring, same old Wharton Association crap. That’s history now, because we finally get the chance to demolish those suckers in person! I can’t thank you enough!”

  She went on and on like that, crediting me for having arranged the whole conference as an opportunity for her to win glory, as if I were a medieval pope calling for a Crusade. I could hear the clang of armor in her raspy voice, the shout of charging infantry.

  I made the vaguest possible noises of agreement with Verity, letting her rave about how it was time to squash Van Deegan Jones’s “hegemonistic stranglehold on Wharton.”

  This comment struck me as somewhat disingenuous. Gallup’s group, the Edith Wharton Collective, had their own journal, their own presence at conferences, and professors situated at prestigious schools. Their voices had not been stifled by the patriarchy and were in no danger of going unheard. Hell, it was mostly women writers who’d led the Wharton revival starting in the 1970s.

  But then Jones was just as out of touch with reality in his own way. He acted as if every article about Wharton he disagreed with was a personal slur, and chipped away at Wharton’s solidity like that madman who hammered at the toes of Michelangelo’s David. As the foremost Wharton bibliographer, I didn’t think anybody’s writing on Wharton could “damage” what was most important: the books and short stories themselves.

  These opinions of mine were, of course, not for public consumption. Just as it would not be a good idea to point out that all those articles, essays, pamphlets, introductions, monographs, and books really weren’t very important.

  If the two Wharton presidents were happy about the conference, some of their standard-bearers were not. I got numerous faxes from people on both sides of the Wharton divide. Some accused me of being hungry for publicity, others of simplemindedness. Several announced the sender’s intention to stay away. A few even seemed to make veiled threats to disrupt the conference, but I couldn’t take such nonsense seriously. What would these academics do? Bombard me with hostile marginalia? Please!

  Stefan was not impressed by what I considered skillful maneuvering with both Wharton bigwigs. But then he was keeping himself aloof from the whole business, or trying to, since he was an artist like Wharton herself.

  All he would say was, “I feel sorry for Edith Wharton.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He looked disgusted. “This is like watching scavengers fight over a carcass.”

  “Great! I’ve never been called a hyena before.”

  Stefan didn’t apologize, and it left me sullen, which was a great mood in which to plan the damned reception for Chloe. Still, if I thought I was aggrieved, Priscilla had it much worse. Coral Greathouse had asked her to introduce Chloe at the reading.

  “I WANT TO die,” Priscilla said to me over lunch a few days after the news hit us. “I want to die.”

  I shushed her. Given the contagiousness a suicide—or even the rumor of one—could have on campus, I didn’t want any students or untenured faculty around us getting dismal ideas.

  “It’s my fault, Nick. I brought it on myself. I’ve spent so much time wishing Chloe evil that it’s caught up with me, it’s backfired.”

  “You really believe that crap? Karma—bad vibes—what goes around comes around?”

  She nodded, and gloomily picked at her chicken croissant.

  I bit hungrily into my cheeseburger. Michiganapolis might have lost its movie theaters, and might have fallen to the invading hordes of Arby’s, McDonald�
��s, Burger King, Crate & Barrel, Pizza Hut, Tower Records, and so on, but it still had Ted’s. Ted’s was a dark, smoky-looking restaurant with terrific burgers and the best jazz jukebox around.

  I sat back and enjoyed Julie London singing “Cry Me a River.” After a moment, I spoke up. “Saying it’s your own fault is blaming the victim. It’s retrograde.”

  “What?”

  “Sorry—do I mean centigrade?”

  Priscilla tried to smile. “I just feel cursed. I’ve spent all this time talking about Chloe, thinking about Chloe, dreaming about Chloe—and now she’s going to be here. My phone has not stopped ringing. Last night I had eighteen messages when I got back from class.”

  “Who from?”

  “Writers, editors, bookstore owners or managers, reviewers, creative writing professors….”

  “And they all hate Chloe?”

  Priscilla nodded. “Everyone’s either commiserating or asking for details of her visit. You’d think the Pope was coming, or Louis Farrakhan!”

  I had an odd vision of a worldwide network of people armed with specially made seismographs that charted every movement, every twitch in the literary world related to Chloe DeVore. It was creepy, and fascinating.

  “Nobody understands how she keeps getting these enormous advances for her books when they don’t really sell,” Priscilla complained.

  “She must have a terrific agent.”

  “She must have a system, like gamblers at Las Vegas.”

  That made sense to me, since publishing really was a crapshoot.

  “With all this interest in what Chloe’s up to,” I mused, “I’m surprised no one’s stalking her.”

  She hesitated. “Don’t be so sure.”

  IT WAS A relief to come home that afternoon from the hothouse of rumor and dread Priscilla and I were constructing. Now and then I had tried to tell myself that Chloe DeVore—whether she came to SUM or not—was nothing to worry about.