The Edith Wharton Murders Page 8

  Finished, Stefan got up and stumbled from the room. Priscilla gave me a baleful, frightened look.

  Stefan was wrong, because he was drunk. None of that happened.

  It was all a lot worse, especially for me.

  Part Two

  “It is less mortifying to believe one’s self unpopular than insignificant….”

  —Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

  4

  I SHOULD HAVE known that the Edith Wharton conference was doomed the morning I read a front-page student newspaper article headlined “Chaos at Campus Center.”

  SUM’s conference center/hotel was a characterless fifties red brick and concrete building that had been haphazardly added to every decade since, creating a small labyrinth of hallways and wings in which people often got lost. Chaos was nothing new there, nor were problems with the physical plant.

  The trouble this time was pipes that had broken overnight, flooding various corridors, and the prediction was that repair work and remodeling might take several months, given the extensive water damage. This was where the conference was supposed to be held—would we have to relocate to a local hotel?

  I couldn’t imagine the reshuffling involved, and, even though Serena Fisch would probably not quail at the task, I was panicky.

  When I called the Campus Center to find out how the repairs would affect our meeting rooms and everything else, an “events secretary” cheerfully told me that there would only be “slight inconvenience.”

  That’s just as comforting as a surgeon talking about “a minor procedure” and I hung up feeling miserable. I decided to dash over to the Campus Center to take a look, which was a big mistake. I discovered that whole corridors were roped off, their walls and floors stained brown, and, in some cases, the walls had cracked and the floors buckled. Workmen were busy cleaning up the mess, which as far as I could tell involved making an even bigger mess: ripping out sections of linoleum-tiled flooring and sodden plaster hunks of wall.

  And the smell: like a dirty wet mop that’s been allowed to ferment in its own pail of filthy water….

  I left, feeling even more dejected. I’d been up late the night before anyway, worrying about the registration, which was still at only a few dozen with the conference just a month away. Part of the problem was that the country’s leading Wharton experts, Cynthia Griffin Wolff of MIT and R.W. B. Lewis of Yale, weren’t attending the conference. Wolff was teaching in Australia this semester, and Lewis, retired, was leading a scholars’ tour of Tuscany. That meant we’d instantly lost what Serena called the “Chapstik contingent”—that is, the academics who’d only show up so that they could kiss ass and hope to accrue some advantage from it.

  As for those who’d come whether there was a Wharton star or not, Serena kept reminding me that academics always register late—it’s the revenge of the powerless, she said. And in fact, I knew I had been guilty of just that crime myself. But if she was wrong, poor attendance would not help the EAR department, which meant it certainly wouldn’t help me. The chair would blame me for making the department look bad.

  I WAS FULLY expecting another crisis when I heard Serena Fisch call my name down the hall from my office a few days after I read about the Campus Center’s busted pipes and went over to inspect the damage.

  She stormed into my office waving two scholarly journals I recognized right away, since I’d lent them to her. She shouted, “This is nuts! This is absolutely nuts!”

  In her royal blue beaded-neck dress with the square neckline, hair in a French twist, and flushed under her heavy makeup, she looked like an irate forties chanteuse.

  Serena smacked the two journals together like cymbals, and fell heavily into the chair nearest me, crossing her legs and angrily swinging one foot. “Nuts,” she muttered. As always, I was struck by the retro way she dressed—it was weird, but it made an impression.

  “I’ve been so busy working on the nitty-gritty of the conference,” she said, “that it wasn’t until last night I sat down to read these. It doesn’t add up. You read the articles and you come away thinking there are two completely different Edith Whartons. One’s a powder puff, and the others a carnival sideshow act! What the hell is going on here?”

  Serena brandished the two Wharton journals at me as if she were a cop giving me the third degree, threatening me to spill the beans or else.

  So I sang.

  “Didn’t I tell you there were two different Wharton societies with two different journals and that they loathe each other?”

  She nodded.

  “Well, it’s like an academic version of the old Star Trek show—you know, parallel universes, and when they come in contact, there’s disaster. At the Modern Language Association conferences, each Wharton society has a separate Wharton panel, and even then there’ve been incidents.”

  “Like what?”

  “People have been forcibly ejected from meetings because they heckled speakers—quiet little academics going nuts! I’m surprised there hasn’t been real violence by now.”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “Listen—these Wharton folks are just like gang-bangers, only they dress marginally better and they don’t have drive-by shootings—they try to destroy each other with sarcastic footnotes.”

  Serena grimaced. “Footnotes can’t hurt anyone.”

  “They sure can. Humiliation’s like dying if all you care about is your reputation. And if the intent is murderous….” I shuddered, having read more than my share of venomous criticism. “They’re just like Conan. There’s that scene when someone asks him how he would define happiness—”

  Serena’s eyes glowed. “Oh, yes! I’ve seen Conan three times.” And then, in a passable Austrian accent she quoted, “To crush your enemies, drive them before you, and hear the lamentation of their women.”

  Looking at Serena’s slightly feverish eyes, I thought that she was someone I had better not ever offend.

  “So tell me more about these societies,” Serena said.

  I complied. “The older group is bigger and fairly conservative, that’s the Edith Wharton Association. They publish Edith Wharton Studies.”

  Serena waved their journal, which had a beige cover and beige contents.

  “Actually, it used to be the Journal of Edith Wharton Studies, but that kept getting abbreviated as JEWS, which made people nervous. For these guys,” I explained, “Wharton’s basically private property. Their thing is that she wasn’t really a feminist, etc., etc. They want to make her safe and dull, and slam feminist critics while they’re at it.”

  “Dull is definitely their forte,” she said.

  “The head of the EWA is Van Deegan Jones. I’m not crazy about him. He’s mildly anti-Semitic.”

  “How so?”

  “He’s got this weird tic. I’ve heard him at conferences when some body’s name comes up, somebody he doesn’t like, and he’ll always say ‘Jewish, isn’t he?’ He’s almost always wrong, but that’s his automatic assumption when he doesn’t think much of the person.”

  Serena frowned.

  “He’s a very distant cousin of Wharton’s. I think that explains his society’s sense of ownership. They make a show of elections every few years, but he’s really president-for-life with no chance of a coup. It’s a mostly male bunch, and they treat Wharton sort of reverentially, but with a tinge of contempt. To them, she’s a minor Henry James, you know? A Lady Writer. It’s really like Wharton’s some stuffed bird under a Victorian bell jar. Quaint, but useless.”

  “I saw that! Some of the articles call her Mrs. Wharton. Unbelievable!” Serena snorted with contempt.

  “Right. Now remember, I would never say any of this in public, so you have to keep it to yourself. I’m a bibliographer. My job is to be humble and helpful and stay out of the politics.”

  Serena shrugged as if to say she understood the ways of the academic world. “What’s with the other group?” She flapped the second journal at me, Wharton Now! On the glossy, neon-colo
red cover, Wharton’s head was dripping off a bookshelf like a Salvador Dali watch.

  “That’s the Wharton Collective.” And here I couldn’t stop myself from grinning, because if the Wharton Association was boring, its rival was almost too interesting.

  “This bunch is wild, way beyond feminism, deconstructionism, or postmodernism,” I explained. “They’re pretty funky scholars, a lot younger than the EWA people. Most of their writing is highly speculative. They’re going for shock value and they’re desperate to say something new at any cost, no matter how crazy. The conference paper and article tides they come up with, God, they’re like headlines from the National Enquirer: Edith Wharton was bipolar, anorexic, a lesbian, she sexually traumatized Henry James, she was a Nazi sympathizer, she was an incest survivor. You name it.”

  Frowning, Serena leafed through the issue of Wharton Now! ”Here’s one that’s really disgusting,” she said, stopping at a title page. “‘Edith Wharton’s Petophilia.’ Yuck. It’s about her dogs!”

  “That’s going to be a full-length study next year,” I said.

  “Goody.”

  “About all that’s left is saying Wharton had a love child with Clemenceau, or she’s been spotted eating ribs with Elvis, or that she appeared in the skies over the Ukraine while peasants wept and fell to their knees.”

  “And who’s in charge of this lunatic asylum?”

  “The leadership rotates. Right now it’s Verity Gallup.”

  Serena said, “Verity Gallup? What a bizarre name!”

  I didn’t mention that some people might find “Serena Fisch” worthy of comment.

  “Verity was a former graduate student of Jones’s, but completely different. Wait till you meet her. They loathe each other. Years ago, after she started teaching, she submitted an article to Edith Wharton Studies which he rejected as soon as he saw it. He didn’t even bother sending it to any readers. Verity was furious and started her own journal.”

  Serena nodded. “I know you said it was oil and water, but I didn’t realize the differences were so big. It’s not just a schism, it’s personal.”

  “Exactly.”

  “But what about the major Wharton scholars you mentioned once, Lewis and Wolff? Which side are they on?”

  “Well, they don’t have to get involved in the politics because they’re so big and both sides want them at their conferences.”

  “And everyone else is a fanatic of one kind or another. Wonderful. We’re hosting a conference of academic militia members.” She grinned. “Isn’t that just what SUM needs? More dissension, more invective? Now I know why you haven’t wanted to talk about a keynote speaker,” Serena said, sitting up sharply and letting the two journals slip to the floor. “It’ll never work. Even if you have one person from each society, like the presidents, whoever goes first, the other side will feel insulted.”

  A sudden gust of wind rattled the enormous rotting window behind me, and I thought that if this were a book or a movie, it would crash in and we’d have a visitation from some maleficent spirit, warning us to turn back.

  We sat in a strange silence, Serena unusually quiet and subdued. Having laid out the territory for her, I felt oddly peaceful, almost as if I were a messenger bearing bad news and relieved to have discharged my mission. We had to put on a conference with two warring clans; choosing a keynote speaker was impossible—yet I felt momentarily free.

  Was that hysteria?

  Serena suddenly leaned forward. “Nick, I’ve been wondering about something. Last week Joanne Gillian was complaining about Wharton ‘perverts’ registered for the conference. That must mean some of the Wharton Collective-ites. But how did she know who was coming? You and I are the only ones with the registration forms. Did she dig up a copy of Wharton Now!, and what would have made her do that?”

  We both turned to Bob Gillian’s empty desk at the same time, obviously thinking the same thing.

  “Jesus,” I breathed. “I’ve left all kinds of conference stuff on my desk and gone out for coffee or to check my mail when he was here. I never thought that could be a problem.”

  Still staring at Bob Gillian’s desk, I had no trouble picturing him checking the hallway through the open door while I was out, and stealing over to my desk, rifling through my papers to see what he could find that would be ammunition for his wife.

  “You have to be more careful,” Serena said.

  I felt like an idiot, and started to turn red.

  But Serena wasn’t paying attention. Head up, eyes half-closed, she was suddenly muttering about the keynote speaker as if she were at a séance trying to contact her spirit guide.

  “Who can we get—who can we get—who can we get?”

  I thought it was worth a try, so I did the same thing, but she stopped and glared at me. I shrugged an apology.

  “Maybe,” I said, “maybe we can find someone who doesn’t belong to either society—at least for the first evening.” But Wharton scholarship was sharply divided, and I knew where everyone belonged. I wildly thought of inviting some actor or actress who had appeared in a Wharton movie or play, but that would be too expensive, and our conference budget was not generous.

  “Wait a minute, Nick. What about that awful woman who was in People magazine last week? The romance novelist?”

  “Oh my God. You’re a genius. We can invite Grace-Dawn Vaughan!”

  Known for best-selling bodice rippers, Vaughan was doing a big trade biography, Passion and Pain: The Loves and Life of Edith Wharton, for which she had just received a six-figure advance from a major publisher. The idea of her having anything new or important to say about Wharton was ludicrous, so I hadn’t even read the article (though I knew it would have to be included in a revised edition of my bibliography).

  “Serena, this is great. She’ll offend everyone,” I said, cheering up for the first time in days. “She’s not a scholar, and she’s rich. They’ll all hate her, and that’ll bring them together.”

  Serena grinned. “I’ll take the heat for inviting her, if you want.”

  I thanked her, and asked what she thought was the best way to contact Vaughan. But before Serena could answer, I jumped to my feet. “Priscilla teaches romance novels in her genre course. Maybe she even knows Vaughan.”

  I dashed across the hall and knocked on Priscilla’s office door and felt like a lottery winner when she opened it and then told me that while she didn’t know Grace-Dawn Vaughan, she had Vaughan’s editor’s name—Devon Davenport—and his phone number.

  I explained what I was up to, wrote down the information she gave me on a Post-it note, and scooted back to my desk to make the call.

  Serena stopped me. “Invite the editor too,” she suggested. “That way we’ll change the focus a little at the beginning of the conference. It’ll be publishing in general and not just Wharton.”

  “If this works—!” I shook my head, dialing the New York number, thinking it might take days to get in touch with Vaughan’s editor.

  It only took a few minutes, and I was soon sorry it was that easy.

  Davenport was as hoarse and loud as a trucker, and snarled at me after I explained myself.

  “Let me get this straight,” he said. “You want us to come all the way out to Nowhere, Michigan, to some half-assed conference and there’s no speaker’s fee for me or my author? Is this a joke? I’ve never even heard of you or your school.”

  I didn’t get defensive, didn’t remind him that it was a university, just said, “We can pay your airfare, of course, and take care of the hotel and the registration fees.”

  I glanced at Serena—who kept all the budget figures in her head—hoping that was true. She nodded encouragingly.

  “You’ve got an airport out there?” Davenport asked with mock surprise.

  “This would be a wonderful way to generate publicity for Ms. Vaughan’s biography,” I said. Serena nodded and gave me two thumbs up.

  “We’re gonna have all the PR we need,” he said, but I knew that no pu
blisher would turn down free publicity. Davenport was hooked, or at least interested; I could hear him chewing his cud for a while. “Okay. Fax me some info and I’ll get back to you.” He barked out his fax number and hung up.

  Hushing Serena so I wouldn’t forget it, I quickly jotted the number down, then told her what Davenport had said. We pulled together the conference information and registration sheets and went downstairs to the EAR office to fax them off to Devon Davenport, both of us feeling the conference had a chance now.

  Serena headed to her office to get ready for her next class.

  As soon as I got back upstairs to my office, I heard wailing from across the hall. It was Priscilla Davidoff, and when I hurried to her open door to see what was wrong, I found her slumped over her phone fax. I was terrified she’d had a heart attack, since I didn’t know CPR.

  She looked up at me, her face ravaged and pale. She held out a few pages that must have come right off the fax, hand trembling as if they were her death sentence.

  I took the pages from her and read a letter from a colleague in England. It was all about Chloe DeVore and Vivianne Fresnel.

  They were back together again. The book they had argued about at my house last month had just been published with Fresnel listed as coauthor and was making the international best-seller lists.

  It got worse: Chloe had set off fireworks in the publishing world by announcing she was going to write a memoir revealing everything about her supposedly wild bisexual past. The book was being described as “Joan Didion meets Joan Collins.”

  Priscilla stared at me in desperation, as if willing me to say she’d misread it all, but she hadn’t.

  The final blow? Chloe and Vivianne were coming to the Wharton conference.

  Now it was my turn to wail. “That’s impossible! Neither one of them has ever published anything on Wharton!”

  “It’s not Wharton,” Priscilla moaned. “It’s me. They probably guessed I sent Vivianne the letter about your party. They’re out to get me for trying to break them up. It’s going to be like Fatal Attraction.”