Cold and Pure and Very Dead (4 page)

T
he Labor Day party
was at the home of Greg and Irena Samoorian. A multi-level contemporary on a couple of semiwooded acres, it was my favorite house in Enfield for kicking back and relaxing. Smoke poured from a restaurant-size gas grill where chicken and ribs sizzled, kids squealed and splashed in the pool, friends and colleagues clustered wherever they could find a puddle of shade on this hot early-September afternoon.

With a baby back rib for a pointer and barbeque sauce instead of chalk smeared on his chin, Professor George Gilman was treating me to an extemporaneous lecture on his favorite topic, the history of the book in America. “A number of social and economic factors caused the publication of popular fiction to escalate rapidly during the postwar years, and led in the 1950s to the rise of the blockbuster bestselling novel.…”

I’d asked George about
Oblivion Falls
, because he was the only person I knew who had the expertise to speak knowledgeably about the background for the novel’s original popularity. All the sudden hoopla about the book had intrigued me. Throughout the long humid final week of August, every time my phone rang I’d had to field yet another request from the media for information about Mildred Deakin and her sensational novel. Inquiring minds from Regis and Kathy Lee to the cultural reporters for NPR were suddenly agog to know
the story of the novel’s composition and salacious details of Deakin’s life and loves.

Fortunately, since I knew virtually nothing about her, I remembered Sean Small. “Professor Small,” I’d told someone from the
Charlie Rose
show, “is a professor at Skidmore College who delivered a paper on Deakin at the last MLA. The MLA? That’s the Modern Language Association convention. The major annual conference for scholars of language and literature. That’s where I learned just about everything I know about Deakin, from Professor Small’s paper. You might as well go directly to him. Yes, Skidmore. Hello? Hello?” I gave Sean Small’s name to the next three interviewers who called. After that, the culture vultures left me alone with my ignorance. But now George was giving me an impromptu quick-and-dirty graduate seminar on twentieth-century popular fiction.

“The sudden freeing-up of paper for peacetime purposes after World War Two,” he continued, waggling the baby back rib, “as well as increased leisure time for women, who had been nudged none-too-gently back into the domestic sphere from their wartime factory jobs; the rise of the paperback book and the Book-of-the-Month Club; postwar prosperity; and a hunger on the part of the public for a return to normalcy—all these extraliterary factors contributed to sharply increased production and distribution in the popular-print market.”

“In other words,” I said, glugging down the last of my pale ale, “a lot more books were published.”

“That’s what I just said,” George replied.

George and I had perched on a cast-iron park bench in a small grove toward the back of the yard. George Gilman was one of my favorite colleagues, an historian whose prodigious knowledge, strong intellectual passions, and
total absence of intellectual pretense all endeared him to me—but he did tend to get carried away. With a sauce-covered finger, George resettled his half-glasses on the bridge of his nose, smearing his cheek in the process. I resisted an impulse to reach out and daub sauce on the other cheek for balance.

“In the case of
Oblivion Falls
in particular,” he said, “a younger generation of writers and readers had come to adulthood, a generation without the wartime responsibilities and deprivations that had focused the energies of their older brothers and sisters on the great public interests of the international community. For this new cohort, the concerns of private life and personal freedom had a heady allure, and Deakin’s populist sympathies and graphic sexual honesty appealed to a wider public than she could possibly have reached in any earlier decade of the twentieth century, a far-wider public certainly than the critically acclaimed Beat poets and novelists of the same era. That
Oblivion Falls
should, in our own era of widespread prosperity and narcissism, once again find a popular audience is not surprising.…”

He paused to tear a tender chunk of pink meat from the rib with which he was gesturing. There went the other cheek.

“Enough, George. Enough.” I laughed. “When I asked for some background on the popularity of
Oblivion Falls
, I didn’t mean to turn party time into work time for you.”

“Work? Heck—this is
fun,”
enthused my little colleague, sucking the final shreds of meat from the rib, then wiping his fingers on his jeans. I offered him a napkin, but he waved it off. “If God didn’t mean us to wipe our hands on our jeans, Karen, he wouldn’t have made denim. You want another beer?” I nodded, and George set off on a booze run.

From my vantage point on the bench, I had a good view of the swirling activity in the pool. Kids cannon-balled into the water, teenagers deployed gigantic splash-guns, parents dandled babies. “Wheeee.” Jill Greenberg hoisted the flame-haired Eloise above her head, then zoomed her down.
Spp-lash!
The baby shrieked with delight. Jill laughed her bubbling laugh and hoisted Eloise into the air again. In a green-and-white-polka-dot bikini, nine months after Eloise’s birth, my young friend was as slim and radiant as ever.

“She’s so beautiful.” George had returned with two sweating beer bottles, and was watching Jill over my shoulder. He handed me a bottle and sighed. “But … she’d never look at me.”

Jill was a stunner, mid-twenties, red-haired, stylish with a big-city edge. George was none of those things. In his early forties, he looked something like a garden gnome, small of stature, thin of hair, pale of skin, and decidedly lacking in fashion sense. This afternoon, in spite of the August heat, he wore a short-sleeved white dress shirt and jeans, the stiff, heavy kind more likely to be found on the sales racks at Agway than at any mall. George was right. Jill would never look at him more than the once it took to put a name to the face, and assign the face to the fatal category of Nice Guys to Pal Around With.

She was at the party with Kenny Halvorsen, her constant companion, six-foot-two of hunky soccer coach. When Jill passed Eloise off to the teen-aged daughter of a colleague, Kenny scooped Jill up, hoisted her over his head, dive-bombed her into the pool.
Spp-lash!

George sighed again. “She is just so
lovely.”
He was on his third beer and beginning to loosen up. I was on my second, and already a little too loose.

“Have you ever been married, George?” I usually don’t ask questions like that, because I usually don’t want to hear the answers.

He shook his head. “The book …” George was the author of a massive and acclaimed study of twentieth-century developments in the history of the book. “…  took ten years to research and write. When I was working on it, I was obsessed. It was all I could think about. I would have made a lousy husband. And then, it just seemed too late. But … you know what I miss the most about not being married? It’s the children. I’d love to have children.” His tone was wistful.

“It’s
not
too late,” I said, always the optimist. “You might find someone yet, and—there’s always adoption.”

“I’ve thought about that; I was adopted myself, you know.” He glugged down beer.

“Really?”

“Yeah. But it’s almost impossible for a single man to get a child. The usual fears …”

Then Jill carted Eloise over and thrust eighteen pounds of wet, squirming baby in my arms, and the conversation took a different turn.

Y
ou know
who you should talk to about
Oblivion Falls?”
Greg poured a tot of brandy into my coffee. The party was over, and I’d stayed behind to help him and Irena clean up. Now Irena was in the babies’ room changing a diaper, while Greg and I sat on the deck under a lavish night sky.

“Who?” I didn’t really care. It was so relaxing here with the stars and the almost tropical darkness, that I just wanted to float through the night in a brandy haze. I didn’t ever want to use my intellect again.

“That new guy in your department. What’s his name? The big hire you made last spring? The Cadaver Chair?”

I laughed so loud, Irena came to the window to find out what was funny.

“Palaver
Chair, you idiot,” I said, smacking Greg with a plastic Thomas the Tank Engine place mat. “And his name is Ralph Brooke. Ralph
Emerson
Brooke. But why ask him?”

“Doesn’t he do the fifties? I remember talking to him about the Beat Generation at the reception the English Department had for him.”

“Not only does he
do
the Beats, I think he
knew
them all. Maybe he even
slept
with them all, given the degree of intimacy he implied during his interview:
As Jack said to me in ’Frisco. Jack? Why, Kerouac, of course
. From what Brooke says, he was a real hipster in the fifties. Hung out with Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti. Anyhow, he wouldn’t know anything about Deakin. Ralph’s the old-style sexist type of academic who’d die rather than look at a popular woman’s novel like
Oblivion Falls.”
Brooke’s hiring still rankled with me. The uproar in the Enfield College English Department the previous spring over the endowed Paul O. Palaver Chair of Literary Studies had torn the department into opposing factions that might well never reunite, the passions had run so hot. By a single vote, the senior male members of the department had voted in a scholar who was anathema to the rest of us: conservative, white, male, and—as far as I was concerned—perilously close to being embalmed. The
Cadaver
Chair, indeed! The academy has no mandatory retirement age, but even I, as open-minded as I am about most things, thought the age of seventy-four was a bit late for taking on what should be a demanding new job. “What
Professor Brooke did in his misspent youth is of no concern to me. It’s his misspent maturity I’m concerned about. Particularly the fact that he’s going to be misspending it in my department.”

Greg sipped his brandy pensively. “I’m amazed the department’s feminist mafia let a canonist like Brooke get through.”

A
canonist?
Well, if that’s not already a word, it should be. “We did our damnedest, Greg. But Brooke is Miles’s last stand. They go
waaay
back—Princeton for grad school, then teaching together for a couple of years early in their careers—at Stallmouth College, I think. After that Miles came here and Ralphie went off … somewhere … maybe on the road with Kerouac, for all I know. But he ended up at the University of Chicago for decades. Now he’s here.”

“So sweet,” Greg said. “Boys together, now together again.” He gave me a big smooshy smile.

“Greg, I think you’re looped.” I pushed my doctored coffee away. I still had to drive tonight.

“Just a leeetle tiny bit,” he replied contentedly, “and it feels so damned good.”

S
peak of the devil
, I muttered to myself first thing the next morning as I glanced out the front window from my booth at the Blue Dolphin diner. Professor Ralph Brooke, Enfield College’s new P. O. Palaver Chair of Literary Studies, plodded up the front steps and into the eatery’s narrow aisle. Following the waitress to a booth in the far back corner, he passed by without seeming to recognize me. Over scrambled eggs and home fries, I had a prime rear view—heavy, stooped shoulders, yards of seersucker, and a fringe of curly iron-gray hair encircling a freckled head. He ordered coffee, then hid behind the outspread pages of the
Times
.

Five minutes later Miles Jewell entered the diner, his thick white hair and summer tan set off nicely by a navy-blue polo shirt. He peered through his steel-rimmed glasses, located his buddy, and veered toward him. At the sight of his old friend, Ralph Brooke folded the paper and rose ponderously. In the most secluded corner of the diner, the two senior scholars pounded each other on the back and chortled together like a pair of happy thieves.

T
hat first Tuesday
of September promised to be summery—hot and muggy—but when I entered
Dickinson Hall at 8:47
A.M
. it was clear the fall semester had begun in earnest. Students hustled through the halls, young women greeting each other with squeals, male students with manly back thumps. In the English Department office, Monica Cassale, our secretary, was enthroned at her desk, deep in a copy of
Oblivion Falls
—I recognized the cover with its flaming orange and red roses. Fielding queries about course offerings and professors’ office hours, Monica scarcely glanced up from her book. The English Department secretary was so efficient that if Miles ever sat back in his big, soft, leather chair in the inner office one day and died, Monica could simply close his door and run the department all by herself. At least for a while. At least until the smell got too bad.

I nodded in the general direction of the desk, and the secretary nodded back without taking her eyes off the novel. I was sorting through the junk from my pigeonhole mailbox, when our chairman himself entered the office. I greeted him with the ritual back-to-school question, “Did you have a productive summer, Miles?”

But it seemed he hadn’t. “Karen, every damn second of my time was eaten up by petty administrative details—curriculum planning, scheduling, hiring. I got no research done. This is absolutely—indubitably, without any doubt whatsoever—the final year I will serve as department chair.”

“Umm,” I responded, with an enigmatic smile. I’d believe that when I saw it. Miles had chaired the English Department for the entire twentieth century. It would take nuclear fission to dislodge him from the seat of power. Especially now that he had his boyhood pal, Ralph Emerson Brooke, in that driver’s seat with him.

I, myself, had had quite a productive summer, I thought, as I retrieved the only salvageable piece of
mail—a note from a former student—and carried it to my desk. And, I gloated, I was now on pretenure sabbatical leave. With no teaching scheduled for the entire fall semester, I planned to spend lovely leisurely days doing research for my biography of the nineteenth-century novelist Serena Northbury. I squared my shoulders in the desk chair, pulled up a yellow lined pad and a blue rolling-tip pen, and inscribed:
To Do This Semester!!!!
Number One:
BEGIN BOOK
.