Murder in the English Department (3 page)

Joe lifted his cutglass punch cup. Nan remembered when Lisa had bought her parents the set at Penneys, a twentieth anniversary gift.

‘Here's to the queen and her court,' Joe slurred, ‘a Christmas toast.'

‘Who won the game?' asked Nan, trying to divert the centre of attention.

‘The Packers,' said Joe.

The eggnog was mollifying everyone.

‘So how about a little yuletide music?' Shirley asked, in a voice Nan would have sworn was their mother's. Easy on the old nog, she reminded herself. Shirley squatted down on her thick haunches, rummaging through a collection of old Lawrence Welks for the Bing Crosby '78.

As Joe was pouring a second ample round, El Bingo joined the party.

‘Now that's the way “White Christmas” was meant to be sung,' smiled Nan, pleasantly enveloped in this safe, familiar ambience. ‘You should have heard the racket coming from the Superway Center.'

As always there was too much dinner on the big oak table. Too much turkey, sage dressing, chestnut dressing, cinnamon yams, turnips, parsnips, creamed onions, mashed potatoes and plenty of hot gravy. Too many sweets from Shirley's mince pie to Lynda's pumpkin pie to Debbie's black and white fudge. Far too much booze, what with all the wine Nan had brought and all the rum Joe had dumped into the eggnog. Shirley and Joe usually went broke for months after the holidays, but they would never dream of serving less. Not at a big family celebration.

Nan didn't notice the fight begin.

‘Whaddaya mean, you want to live at Berkeley,' Joe was saying through a mouthful of mince pie.

‘It's hard, Dad, the commute. I don't have any time for my college friends.'

‘What's wrong with your Hayward friends, Lisa? They were good enough for the first eighteen years. Those girls from the high school are still around. You told me yourself that Darlene is working at Capwell's. And isn't what's-her-name-Annamarie at the Alameda County Hairdressers' College? What's wrong with your Hayward friends—and with your family, for that matter?'

Valiantly Lisa held back the tears.

Shirley nodded caution to her husband. She agreed with Joe about Berkeley, but she knew he wouldn't make his point this way. Nobody won when you lost your temper.

‘Naw,' he waved away his wife's hint, ‘don't you go giving me none of your “keep it private” looks.' He swallowed the last piece of pie as if it were Milk of Magnesia. ‘Naw, I say this is family business, whether Miss Priss is going to leave home and live with all those street junkies and queers and weirdos.' He glanced at Nan, whether in accusation or apology she couldn't tell.

‘He doesn't mean any offence,' whispered Bob.

Nan was staring past Joe, concentrating on a pattern in the flowered wallpaper, as if her glasses were binoculars to a freer world. She turned back to Lisa who sat silent and angry, with tears streaming down her face.

‘If you ask me,' Joe said in a lower voice, ‘Lisa could just as well go to the junior college like Lynda and Debbie done.' He smiled benignly at Debbie, the bearer of his imminent grandchild.

‘Perhaps now isn't the best time to discuss it,' suggested Shirley. ‘Being that it's Christmas and we haven't seen Nan for a month. Tell us about that trip you made, to Kansas, wasn't it, to lecture to those professors.'

‘Yes,' Nan said, trying to sound interesting. ‘Yes, I talked about Virginia Woolf as a forerunner in feminist criticism, showing her influence on …' The Berkeley idiom reflexively returned when she discussed her work. ‘I mean, she was an important woman writer who …'

‘Oh, yes,' Shirley nodded, just holding back a yawn. The others searched around the table for the last scraps of dessert. Joe was eating a creamed onion with his fingers.

‘Well now,' Nan interrupted herself, ‘How about opening the presents?'

‘You all go in and I'll start the coffee,' said Shirley. She looked relieved that the celebration was back in gear.

Before Shirley returned with the percolator and the tray of coffee cups, Joe had managed a grope along Nan's back to determine if she were wearing a bra. An old trick of his. This treatment occurred every holiday, but usually toward the end of the evening. No use lecturing about the finer points of sexual harassment, Nan knew, so she slid to the other end of the couch.

Shirley poured coffee and then sat down deliberately on the cushion between her husband and her sister.

Everyone's generosity was unqualified. Nylon shirts and polyester slacks and orlon sweaters—all wash 'n' wear in the latest Sears colours. They honoured Nan's strange aversion to synthetic fibres. She received a cotton tablecloth, a silk scarf, a wool muffler and a flannel nightie. Chastened, Nan thought how lucky she was to have a family tolerant of her eccentricities. Shirley regarded wash 'n' wear as unequivocal progress—one less thing to iron. But if Nan wanted to iron, well, that was her business.

Only two protests were made that afternoon, both by Shirley. Her first objection was to the big ring she received from Joe.

‘Aw, it's only a zircon, hon,' he said lying with his legs across Shirley's lap. He picked up his Alka Seltzer and drank deeply. Before Shirley could protest further he added, ‘Just wait 'till I make foreman; it'll be a real diamond then.'

‘But Joe, we can't afford …' she began.

‘Now don't tell me what we can't afford,' he said. ‘I'm the one who brings home the money. I'm the one who'll do the affording.'

Shirley was also taken aback by the silk blouse that Nan had given Lisa. She asked if it wasn't a little too old for the girl. The girl didn't think so. In fact the present brought a smile to Lisa's face for the first time since dinner.

Throughout the evening, Nan kept stealing glances at Lisa. On the whole she looked OK. A little pale perhaps. But everyone turned grey around the gills at Christmas. Lisa would be just fine when they checked those tests at Memorial Hospital tomorrow. Nan was almost convinced that this ‘mysterious illness' was a reaction to commuting between Hayward and Berkeley, a kind of cultural carsickness. Once Lisa had moved from home, Nan tried to reassure herself, she would get better. Yes, she insisted, Lisa would be all better.

Chapter Three

NAN ALWAYS HAD A
HANGOVER
the morning after a family gathering, no matter how little she had drunk. Today she resolved not to think about it—about the things said and not said, the covert touches, the miles of tension that hung on the walls like electrified barbed wire. She would not think about it until she had a cup of coffee.

Viennese, ground for Melita, real drip coffee. And a boiled egg in her china cup. A good breakfast with a sunny view of the Bay from her studio flat. Bourgeois indulgence all of it, but just the remedy for family hangovers.

It would be hot today, one of those mid-winter bonuses in Northern California.

The telephone rang. Who could it be on the day after Christmas? Of course, it was Amy. Amy, whose lawyer voice was ever alert and urgent.

‘So how was the Big Holiday?' she was asking.

‘Fine. Fun in some ways.' Nan smiled. ‘Actually it went better than I had expected. No murders.'

‘Fun,' replied Amy, in that tough-kid-from-the-projects tone, that heavy Brooklyn accent. ‘You're so tolerant of your family, Nan.'

‘Tolerant,' Nan laughed, relieved to be talking to her old friend who also knew the treacheries of inter-class travel. ‘Smug maybe, angry maybe, guilty maybe.'

‘No, tolerant,' insisted Amy. ‘Five minutes with my father, the Yiddish red neck, and I go bonkers.'

Nan shook her head. ‘Ah, that's just your cynical, upwardly mobile act. Speaking of which, are you calling to say you've got to prepare a brief or something awful tonight?'

‘Nope. I'm calling to confirm our hot movie date.'

‘Fine,' said Nan. ‘I'll pick you up at seven. And, say, how was your Christmas with Warren?'

‘Terrific. Just the two of us, lovey dovey. Who knows why we're still happy after all these years.'

Nan laughed. ‘Don't question, just enjoy.'

‘Right,' said Amy, but her voice was distracted already. ‘Gotta run. Bye.'

Nan returned to her sunny seat, thinking how much she loved her friend, how much she needed Amy's adrenalin and intelligence and loyalty. But sentimentality irritated Nan, so she considered the weather again. Might get as high as seventy degrees today. She thought about the Christmas holidays with Charles at Carmel-by-the-Sea. Right now she wouldn't mind a little tan to fortify her through the winter. Of course she couldn't afford it—neither the room rates nor the time. She had promised herself to finish an article. And she had promised Marjorie Adams they would discuss her dissertation this afternoon. Nan slipped her black coffee slowly, wondering if she actually
liked
Marjorie Adams. There was something about the student's old-fashioned integrity Nan admired. But sometimes that integrity became rigidity. The latter was on full display at the last departmental meeting. Nan had made a motion before her colleagues, asking them to support the Sexual Harassment Campaign in two ways. The Feminist Caucus would take a poll of all students in the English Department, asking whether they had ever been assaulted or propositioned by a teacher.

‘Of either sex?' asked Angus Murchie, waiting for appreciative laughter.

‘Of either sex,' Nan continued steadily. ‘The second motion is that the Department formally request the Academic Senate to establish a grievance committee.'

Marjorie Adams did not approve of the Sexual Harassment Campaign. This was evident in her frown, before she spoke.

‘Don't you think one could get a little, um, hysterical about these issues?' she asked hesitantly.

Nan stared at her down the huge table. Was she hearing right? Somehow she felt that if she stared, she might hear more clearly.

Murchie was nodding his grey head in considered agreement. This was the sort of ‘non-academic' issue he considered inappropriate in a scholarly atmosphere. No doubt he would remind his colleagues of Nan's indiscretion during her tenure evaluation.

‘I mean,' Marjorie leaned forward and spoke earnestly through her dark red lips, ‘surely the complaints are justified sometimes? But how does one know when they've been, well, provoked?'

Nan glowered at Marjorie in disbelief, remembering how hard she, herself, had fought for student representation at departmental meetings. Nan had to respect this student's courage in arguing with her thesis adviser so openly. Such a goddam stalwart character. What was her spine made from—sterling silver? Again Nan realized how little she understood this young woman.

‘Doesn't that sound like “blaming the victim”?' Nan asked carefully.

‘A girl learns to avoid certain situations,' Marjorie said. ‘Besides, the “victim” in some cases might be the male professor unjustly accused.'

Matt interrupted with his characteristic diplomacy, ‘Why don't we let the Feminist Caucus take their poll? We can consider the second motion next quarter.'

The vote was almost unanimous, with only Murchie objecting.

Nan returned to the present,
checked her watch and gulped down a second cup of coffee. With this rush of medium roast caffeine, Nan was ready for all the Marjorie Adams and Joe Growskys of the world. She coasted her bicycle out of the garage. She would make it down to the office by 10.30, a good start for the day after Christmas.

Entering the university through the North Gate, Nan realized once again that the campus was never really empty. She recognized the usual holiday crowd of suntanned refugees who played an acrobatic brand of Frisbee, children on skateboards, black men summoning the ghosts of their African fathers on steel drums. For Nan herself, the campus had been a different kind of sanctuary.

Her face softened, recalling that first scary visit in the early 1950s. The campus had been different then, less ‘developed', greener, more like a park. Nan Weaver had come to Berkeley for an entrance test. She remembered walking out the front door of Hayward Union High School, past the fake Grecian columns, and taking the Key System buses. Riding through the rolling hills, past Oakland's industry and into Berkeley's greenery, she had caught glimpses of San Francisco and the ocean beyond. It was like being delivered from the tense confinement of a family Sunday into a frontier where she could see past her parents' ambitions.

The high school teachers always said Nan was a bright kid. Mom hoped she might take a business course, maybe become a legal secretary. But something inside Nan insisted, even then, that she wouldn't be imprisoned in Hayward. She would escape the rodeos and the embroidery exhibits. Nan had decided on that first visit, almost thirty years ago, that Berkeley would be her refuge. And indeed, she had spent the best years here—the fifties as an undergraduate, the late sixties getting her PhD, and now back again, after several years away, as a professor. An Assistant Professor.

Nan paused for a moment, astride her bicycle, to look beyond the campus to the clear view of San Francisco Bay. How the skyline had changed. Today the campus was offering up continual waves of association. She thought about the first day of classes in September 1951 and how this had seemed like the most beautiful view in the world. It still did. As a freshman (now they called it ‘freshperson', a term Nan believed in, but stuttered on) during that first year, she had sat furtively in the back rows of Wheeler Hall while liberal professors professed their passions for the vernacular in Wordsworth or the mysticism in Yeats. She heard them answering questions she had been afraid to ask at Hayward Union High School. And out on Sproul Plaza, during the political rallies, she learned that some people opposed the fighting in Korea, that Americans had established internment camps for the Japanese during World War II, that Adlai Stevenson was not a dangerous Communist.

Why was she feeling so nostalgic this morning, Nan wondered. Here she was, standing in the middle of campus staring at the Bay. Maybe it was the holidays.

God, her parents had been tickled that Easter holiday she brought home Charles Woodward, dark, handsome, rich and pre-med. ‘Such a nice type,' Mom had declared. Charles and Nan had fallen in love during their senior year, in 1955, early February when the tulip trees bloom over by the Ag-Econ building and the eucalyptus begin to glisten in their pungent sweat. He was smart, funny and kind. He would earn a good living. What else could Nan want in a husband? Charles invited her for long weekends to the Woodward family ranch in Marin County, for exciting afternoons of horses and champagne picnics, for elegant evenings of port in the parlour. Charles took her away from her small room in Kelly Hill to masquerade parties and fancy balls on Fraternity Row.

The Bay. She got engaged because of this Bay. She recalled the night that Charles drove, with the Studebaker's top down, into the dark Berkeley hills. As they looked out over the flickering San Francisco skyline, he presented her with a huge diamond ring.

Charles offered a one-way ticket from Hayward. And love. They promised each other a life of love.

From the beginning the marriage was strained by her ‘independent streak', as Mom called it. Nan insisted on teaching high school.

Why couldn't she just settle down and have children? She could afford it. God knew, none of their friends had married a doctor. No, Nan said. She wasn't satisfied. And, despite persistent feelings of unnaturalness, she didn't want to have children.

This morning, as Nan cycled past bleak Tolman Hall, she thought how the Tolman library there wasn't even built in the fifties and how it was filled with tear gas when she returned as a graduate student. Berkeley was her refuge in the late sixties, after ten years of high school teaching and marriage. After a stale and painful decade of port in the parlour which ended as port in the kitchen, dining room, bedroom and a little pocketflask which she carried for fortification on the way home from Amy, the divorce lawyer.

How had she married this unimaginative, conventional, controlling man? Nan persecuted herself with such questions until she remembered what it was like to be twenty-one years old and to believe in the immutability of love. What it was like to marry ‘up' and away from Hayward. Only after this freedom, did she realize that she needed more freedom. Shirley said she was selfish. Mom said she was foolish (‘Are you never satisfied, daughter, always moving on?'). Charles said she would be sorry. She heard these voices over and over. But she did not feel selfish or foolish or sorry. She felt scared and brave.

In the sixties, she was a returning student. An older woman. If she could survive Hayward and Charles, she could survive being a ‘mature student'. She thought she had come back to the same campus, but the atmosphere had been changed indelibly by Civil Rights, Free Speech, Black Power, Ethnic Studies and the Anti-War Movement. Nan helped to occupy several buildings, got arrested, then acquitted. They were creating—she was helping to create—a counter-culture, a freedom of the highest order. Academic freedom. Political freedom. Sexual freedom.

Passing by the Life Sciences Building, she remembered one terrible evening filled with Professor Eastman's admonitions to her to ‘hang loose, let go of inhibitions, relax'. The professor seemed so concerned about her. Personally concerned. He said he admired her willingness to change, to experiment and grow. Nan admired his mind, his intricate lectures on D H Lawrence.

Until once, after a moratorium meeting here in LSB, when he had kept her late, talking. Teacher and student together. Down with élitism, he murmured. Still, she wondered why he bothered about someone from the sticks. Why should he go out of his way? Suddenly, she understood.

‘Just a minute', she heard herself saying as his fascination with her pendant watch turned to fascination with her breast.

She pulled away, but he was pinching her nipple through her bra.

‘Professor Eastman,' she gasped, trying to knock away his hand.

‘Ted,' he said, moving closer and nibbling at her ear. ‘Call me Ted. We're both adults.'

‘No,' she said, frightened and guilty all at once. Did he think she was loose because she was a divorcee?

‘You misunderstood me,' she forced herself to speak. ‘I like you as a teacher, as a friend, but …'

‘Don't play ingénue.' His voice was seductive, his words sarcastic. ‘A woman in her thirties has been around.'

She wanted to tell him that she had only slept with her husband, that she still related sex with love. And she realized how much she would sound like Shirley.

Before she could form a response, he had forced his tongue into her mouth. And Nan didn't know what to do, how to repel him. It was a perfectly spontaneous act when she bit it.

‘Why you little,' he pulled away, his fingers in his mouth checking for blood. ‘You little cockteaser,' he snarled, ‘I've got a mind to …'

But Nan hadn't heard the rest. She had run from the room, down the dim corridors of the Life Sciences Building and into the clean, night air, asking herself what she had done, how she had led him on. The
Daily Cal
had just run a series of articles about ‘co-ed poachers' who stole men from faculty wives. She didn't think she was a poacher. She had no designs on Professor Eastman, except as a thesis adviser. Of course she had to forget that. She dropped his class, applied for part-time status and lost her financial aid that term. The following quarter, she switched her thesis subject from D H Lawrence to Virginia Woolf.

For months she tried to dismiss the incident as trivial, as something that a ‘free woman' would often endure. But friends told her not to be ashamed of her naïveté. She understood that Eastman was assaulting her integrity as well as her body. Within a year Nan was able to smile that the professor had initiated her, not into his notion of sexual freedom—but into her commitment to feminism.

Now, a decade later, it was hard to believe
she
was a professor and a thesis adviser. When she lectured in Wheeler Hall about the female vernacular or matriarchal mysticism, she kept a careful eye out for bright students in the back row.