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Brainstorm: Lives of the Mind Gina Barreca

May 6, 2008

Murder Mystery VII: No Herring for Breakfast

Mann’s heart had been removed in a small room off the infrequently used and underground corridor connecting Satis Library to the Shaker library. The heart was cut out of Mann’s chest shortly before five a.m., the preparations having taken quite some time, what with finding a drop cloth to cover the concrete floor and getting the right tools together. One should always find the right tools, decide on the correct methodology, before embarking on any project, whether it involves the investigation of a complex text or a complex chest cavity. Mann himself would have approved. Rigorous one must always be, especially when the text under consideration (isn’t the body a text?) is at risk for rigor mortis.

These tools included a small sharp saw, nothing intricate, as well as a few good knives. After all, Mann had already been dead for some time. Everything was fairly solid, not too messy, and not too hard to clean up. Easy enough to get the body in Mann’s office and prop him up in the chair, easy enough to arrange for Mann’s jacket to obscure the mess underneath, easy enough to open the windows in his office (Mann usually left one open anyway) to alleviate the smell, which was bound to become noticeable soon, and to exit.

After all, Mann’s office was on the ground floor. (Mann joked that The Evil One — as he referred to Mrs. Kunkle — put him there so as to thwart his successful commission of suicide after reading end-of-term student papers; throwing himself from the ground-floor window would prevent him from achieving his goal, and that was The Evil One’s sole ambition in life.) The amateur surgeon took the tools and the bloodied drop cloth away in a knapsack and dumped them into the Connecticut River. Remorseless, relaxed, and, surprisingly, slightly peckish, he decided to make himself a hearty breakfast when he returned home.

Hillborne lost the football game to Cornell. This was no surprise. The most exciting thing that happened was that Suki McDonnel (Colby Sawyer Junior College, ’69) slipped her hand under the Black Watch tartan rug to rub gently at Bud Norris’s heavy thigh until he got quite excited for a man his age, while her husband Petey McDonald (‘59) serenely continued to drink the mulled cider she had put in the Big Pine thermos that morning. But all this happened in the bleachers, not on the field.

Cynthia and John parted about three in the afternoon, Cynthia to go down to White River to shop and John to go back to TGBB.

They did not have sex.

That night Mann’s murderer cried and cried into his lover’s pillow.

But she assumed he cried because the Big Pine Men had practically handed the game to Cornell. She stroked the blond curls on Kicker’s head and thought how sweet he looked stripped down to the waist, like an angel, not rough at all.

Comment [9]

May 3, 2008

My Grad Students Want Sex. Let Me Explain ...

They want some sex in the Murdering the Mann Mystery. And they want it now. They are angry that Cynthia and John have not, as yet, had a passionate affair. They are writing out their frustrations on the official board, but mostly they are stopping me in the hallways and at the end-of-semester parties and, well, yelling at me.

“You’re always telling us about the erotic underpinnings of the social systems operating in academe. Put your money where your mouth is,” they tell me. Or they suggest narrative contexts where it might be intriguing to engage some character’s mouth in a far less metaphorical sense. They are tapping their collective and combined M.A. and Ph.D. heels.

I am less certain.

Cynthia and John? Miss R. Furbished and the librarian, perhaps? Kicker and Cynthia, or Kicker and the librarian, for that matter?

I hadn’t expected to include steamy scenes in Satis library, despite the name of the place; I had, I’ll admit, set it in a place I found pretty unromantic and uninspiring (all that cheese, perhaps). But maybe they’re right.

Your thoughts on the necessity of and possibilities for sex in the text, dear readers? Do you want me to say please?

Comment [15]

April 29, 2008

Murder Mystery VI: A Red Herring?

[Contributed by Norman Stevens, Devoted Reader and Librarian Extraordinaire]

“Human beings can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned.”

— Saul Bellow, in “Him With His Foot in His Mouth”

Since his appointment as head librarian at Hillborne slightly more than 10 years ago, Timothy Peason, a wiry Englishman with a small mustache and the tenacity of a bulldog, had survived three presidents in his quest to move what had been a languid backwater locked in the late 19th-century into the electronic era of the early 21st century.

Noted for his role, as assistant librarian of the Molesworth Institute, in helping plan for the first non-book academic library (“The Fully Electronic Academic Library” College & Research Libraries 67: 8-14, January 2006), Peason had used his velvet glove to charm the trustees, the college administration, and the technologically oriented faculty into packing the small, crowded building with computers and other technology. He had gradually instituted a plan to eliminate a large portion of the book collection by weeding out books that had not circulated in a given period of time that at present is two academic years. The morning of Professor Mann’s murder Peason had held a major ceremony to mark the reduction of the collection by 75 percent since his arrival.

Peason’s other mission, which was in large measure a matter of a dog marking his territory, was to eliminate all of the faculty offices in Satis Library. He was especially incensed that the faculty occupants had keys to the building that let them come and go at will. He had only been able to reclaim an office when the current occupant developed Alzheimer’s disease, moved to Florida, or, most often, died, as the assignments had traditionally been for an unlimited period of time.

Professor Mann was Peason’s main nemesis, and they had been waging war against one another for years. Initially unwilling to take the time or effort needed to bring books from the stacks that belonged in his office, Mann had insisted that any competent student or faculty member who wanted to use books by, or about, Faulkner, Twain, Wolfe, or any other major male literary figure before 2000 should know that they would be found in his office where they were readily available during the six hours a week he held office hours provided he did not have another visitor. Frustrated by the danger that Peason’s war against books posed, Mann had utilized the library’s new technology by employing Muffy McCoy to bring her laptop to his office — he would not, he always said, be “caught dead” with a computer as indeed he wasn’t — to charge all of “his” books out, and then quickly discharge them, to frustrate Peason’s biblicidal campaign.

The only concession that Peason had made to books was to enthusiastically promote the Satis Library’s one and only special collection. The Cecily Cardew Memorial Murder Morgue (CCMMM), as it is popularly known, had been established in 1932 shortly after the arrest, conviction, and execution of Professor Augustus Mann Chamberlain — a distant relative of the recently deceased Professor Mann — for the seduction, impregnation, and murder of a freshman student and her unborn daughter. Miss Cardew’s family had established an endowment of $2-million for the development and operation of a collection of detective fiction, especially works that dealt with murder, in the hopes that the contents would lead to the solution of the kind of personal tragedy that had befallen them.

On the morning after the demise of Mann, Peason was quietly celebrating the recovery of another faculty office into which he could put several computer workstations, when Noughleigh Rhee Furbished, the curator of the CCMMM, rushed into his office without knocking. Having committed what is usually regarded as the closest thing to a mortal sin that a staff member could commit, the lanky, and visibly distressed, Miss Furbished blurted out that one of her most precious treasures had been kidnapped. A maiden lady librarian of the old school, she had been transferred, with a handsome increase in salary, to her current position just six months ago from her previous job as book mender, since there were no more library books to be mended. A book needing repair, no matter how often it had been used, had been deemed as fit for the funeral pyre as one that had not been circulated.

When she finally stopped sobbing, not for the unexpected death of Mann with whom ages ago she had been linked romantically, over the loss of a book, Peason managed to extract the vital facts from her. By far the rarest book in the collection had been the only known copy of an anonymous 1869 novel, My Heart Is Missing. Based on a true-life case in a well-known college, it was highly regarded as the first piece of detective fiction set in an academic institution and among the first to be narrated by the victim. With mixed emotions over the death of Mann, the recovery of a faculty office, and the loss of the library’s most precious treasure, Peason’s brain finally brought him to the realization that the circumstances could be put to excellent use.

They presented him with another opportunity to press for the elimination of all faculty offices in the library, as it was obviously not safe for occupants to be in them when the library was closed. They also might enable the police to solve the crime, which must have been connected to the theft of his book, thus fulfilling the wish of Miss Cardew’s family and perhaps persuading their still filthy rich descendants to contribute additional funds that would better suit his purposes.

He quickly asked his secretary Emily to contact the campus police.

Comment [9]

April 28, 2008

Murder Mystery V: No Regrets

The killer had spent an hour looking through the book Mann wrote in 1952 on Melville and systematically tearing out pages that dealt with the sexual overtones in Moby Dick. The killer remembered how in grade school, when they first even heard of the title, kids would make fun of it, making the “Dick” part sound smutty, wagging their hands between their legs. Turns out they were right. Mann made it his business to point out every filthy part of the book in his typical, blunt way, condescending and fascinated both at once. Page after page was ripped from the binding. Mann’s reign had gone on long enough. The job was finished. Time to start on Mann’s book on Whitman because that one was even worse.

Vera Campbell, Washington Jefferies, and Ahmed Farouk decided to give the scholarship to Mark Johnson over beers at the Bull’s Tail bar. They congratulated themselves. They were in quite a jolly little mood. Let that pig Gail’s father sue. They raised their glasses high and toasted to opportunities seized. Maybe Hillborne wasn’t such a bad place to teach after all. They all agreed that with Mann out of the way life was going to be much easier. He always dominated the department, angering all and helping no one. Ahmed suggested that they chip in together to get him the heaviest gravestone possible so that he would stay underground where he belonged. Vera suggested that they scatter his ashes down the middle of frat row. Washington thought it might be better to scatter them in the K-Mart lingerie department so that Mann might be even more uncomfortable. They enjoyed themselves thoroughly.

Winkie went to bed before midnight, covers up beneath his chin despite the over-heating in his 18th-century brick house. He had strange dreams of barbecues, what with finding the body there at four o’clock and all the following mess, all that talk about what they found on the bonfire tonight.

Muffy cried herself to sleep because Kicker booted heavily in the girl’s bathroom down the hall and then left her by herself to clean up after him.

Saturday morning brought out the alumni, most of whom had abandoned the fairly humiliating search for their youth sometime around midnight the previous evening. They expected, every year, to feel part of the community once again but it rarely happened. They saw their sons and their grandsons, a few saw their daughters, with painted Pine faces and outlawed native-symbol sweatshirts, running across campus or standing near the bonfire, a mug raised to the nighttime sparks. But some remembered all too well the disdain they’d felt when the middle-aged executives returned to the parties, trying to fit in and never succeeding. They went back to the Inn and drank with their wives, silent in a room overlooking the green.

The following morning they met and clustered in the lobby of the venerable Arborville Inn. There was much good humor to be resorted with much slapping of back and bottom. Their wives, arrayed in the dark pine-green turtlenecks and knife-pleated skirts that betrayed their origins and their aging knees, stood by anxiously willing to please.

One by one they were brought into the circle and introduced by the nicknames they continued to use: Bud met Mackie, Snapper met Penny, Chip met Suki and Dinkie met Duckie. These people ran multinational corporations under their family names but preserved their individuality, as they saw it, by using the intimate form of address they used 20, 40, for some with enormous courage, 60 years ago when they ran the campus. Someone would comment on the death of old Mann and someone would make a joke playing on the professor’s name and they would laugh falsely and quickly, and then talk of something else. They only had three days in town, after all, and were only too aware of their own mortality.

Mann’s killer mingled briefly with the alumni groups this bright morning, shaking hands and greeting friends. Whitman wrote that one should sail for deep waters only, risk the ship, ourselves and all, thought the killer. That meant no regrets. Didn’t t it? Whitman should have regretted his own actions, thought the killer fiercely, angrily, but there’s no reason to regret mine.

John and Cynthia drank coffee at her apartment and compared theories. They often engaged in this activity, but never before had the theories focused on the possible motives for murder. They were doing quite well, considering. Mann had been killed after 11 p.m. on Thursday evening. His heart had been removed between, oh, four and five in the early morning of the following day. Winkie then discovered the body around four p.m. Did the person who killed Mann remove his heart?

The strangling seemed a spontaneous gesture; it was the sort of death that could happen if you suddenly found your hands on a tie around somebody’s throat. She hadn’t liked the use of the passive voice, either, thinking like the English teacher she was, but she caught, as they say, his drift. The police thought the murder and the heart removal were committed by two different individuals.

But Mrs. Kunkle, the department secretary who watched over her territory the way a seasoned guard watches a cell block, had not seen any strangers go in or out of the building all day. Mrs. Kunkle, with her salmon-colored hair and peach-colored lipstick, sat in the heavily paneled room of the Satis Library English Office like a creature transported from another planet. She claimed to be indifferent to her posh surroundings and was heard to say that she preferred a little light to the colors made by the stained glass windows of which the college was so proud. She worked hard and had raised to adulthood a family of the six boys, all of whom attended UNH and were the happier for it. Mrs. K. had been out only during her lunch break. She said that Professor Mann had not answered telephone calls that went through his office. She had simply assumed he was out. He did not have office hours until later in the afternoon. She had not knocked on his door. He wasn’t as nice as some of her other professors, she had to admit it though she hated to speak ill of the dead, God rest his soul. She had plans to move nice Professor V. to Mann’s office as soon as all the fuss was over.

The body, according to the police, must have already been in the building while the heart was removed.

As Mann’s killer hurried down the road past the old gymnasium, he was thinking about Whitman.

Meanwhile, the remover of Mann’s heart had a second cup of coffee and thought about Emerson.

They were indeed very different sorts of individuals.

Comment [8]

April 27, 2008

Murder Mystery IV: Pig Heart

Hillborne College’s Satis library looks very much like the library at Brooklyn College although few people have commented on this striking similarity; certainly Hillborne alumni would disdain the comparison. But John Vincento thought of Brooklyn with an almost physical longing. Although he had to admit that the surroundings in Arborville were aesthetically superior to those around Avenue J, John longed at this moment for a subway rumble under his feet and for cheap good food, specifically sausage and peppers, pastrami on rye, or, to tell the truth, anything without the ubiquitous melted cheddar cheese that covered all warm food in New Hampshire.

John shuddered against the dry, hard cold and turned into the doorway of the library only to realize that it was closed for the homecoming weekend. Nobody could study if there was a home football game — this was a given, a fact of life as part of what was laughingly called the Hillborne community. The library closed on Friday evening at five and would open again on Monday morning at eight. Nobody could get in or out and only a few of the faculty could obtain passkeys. John considered the wasted effort of the afternoon this far and resolved to work diligently on TGBB until midnight. It would be a good night to stay indoors, anyway.

Tonight was bonfire night and the wood pile to be burnt in pagan glee by the freshman class would go up in smoke in an hour or so. John often wondered whether there now existed entire small towns on the Canadian border permanently cut off from intercourse with large urban centers because Hillborne freshman needed railroad ties to burn.

And there would be booting later on. All the way down the street, they would boot — this being one of the many words otherwise unadventurous Hillborne students coined to describe methods and forms of what simpler souls called vomiting. If it was a particularly good night, some of the real campus heroes might even power boot, the modified term indicating, as far as John could determine from a distance, an actual projectile event. The way Eskimos had thirty words for snow, frat boys had thirty words for throwing up. Years later, at Microsoft luncheons and SONY dinners, one Hillborne man would lean over to another and they would reminisce over the great times and great boots they had, leading companions from other less prestigious colleges to come up with far more interesting interpretations for the term.

John put an iPod over his ears and cursed Maria for her determination to go the Women’s History Conference in Oregon. He could have stayed in Maria’s apartment in Somerville, could have gone to visit his father in Queens, could have gone with Maria to Oregon for that matter, but instead he locked himself in his own place and typed.

Just before eleven, Cynthia Maxwell knocked loudly enough on John’s door to get him away from “Porphyria’s Lover” and a bootleg tape of The Band. When he saw Cynthia’s large frame taking up most of his doorway, John was slightly more than surprised although less than shocked. They were mildly companionable, having dinner together a few times every month, serving on many of the same committees, both working on 19th-century literature. What he couldn’t t understand was why she would walk even the three blocks from her house to his on such a night as this, as the poet said, with fire and shrieking all around her.

John, turn off your computer and give me a drink. Cynthia, who was never, ever called Cindy, removed her gloves. She accepted a large drink, faculty as well as students being known for their romance with alcohol, and with the strange grace peculiar to large women, she sat near the fireplace, taking a pillow from the sofa and placing it on John’s tiled floor.

Okay, Cynthia, what s up? Trouble with Harris? Harris was Cynthia s ex-husband who was given to drinking and writing 15-page letters that Cynthia invariably read and cried over. He was independently wealthy and ran a small literary journal out of Craig Rock, Maine, so in fact deserved very little pity. Harris had, in the mid-seventies, been a student of Cynthia’s at Hillborne.

Christ no. Who cares about him? No, this is about Mann. She raised her dark brown eyes to meet his and paused, lips slightly open.

What about him? John drank the concoction of Southern Comfort and Coke that he had been drinking since he was underage in Ozone Park. He waited for Cynthia to say what she had to say, as she always did, in her own time. Meanwhile he thought of the way her 40 years suited her, how she must have waited her whole life to reach this point of beauty, where her age and size and grace all came together.

It’s more or less about Mann, anyway. They found a heart on the bonfire pile tonight before they lit the fire. It was attached, she gulped and pursed her lips as she spoke, to one of the lower pieces of wood. One of my students told me. Mary Anne Hanley. She was one of the freshmen elected to start the fire. She won a contest.

What did she do? I mean with the heart?

She wrapped it in her Big Pine hat and brought it to the campus police station.

Was it a sheep heart or something? A gag. You know.

They think it s a pig’s heart but they weren’t t sure by the time I left. It wasn’t human. It wasn’t Mann’s actual heart. Well, maybe it was. No. Here’s the worst bit. It had a tag on it saying, “In the day, in the night, to all, to each, sooner or later, delicate death.” They didn’t t know what to make of it at the police station.

It’s from Whitman, offered John.

For Chissake, Johnny Boy, I know it is. I’m saying that at the campus police station they didn’t know that. Ben, you know Ben, Cynthia had dated Ben, who headed the local police station, once or twice. He was older and leaner than most of the men Cynthia dated. Well, he called to ask me to come help out. All of this took place about seven this evening. I’m a wreck. Whitman, a pig’s heart in this girl’s Big Pine hat, plus her crying over the fact that she wouldn’t get to light the fire now, it’s all too much for me.

OK, OK. What do you want me to do? John bit the nail of his thumb, hoping against hope that all Cynthia wanted to do was drink and talk. He didn’t t want to go out tonight. He had been enjoying himself. He had written a few words, but words of quality. He had daydreamed. He had been picturing himself as he was when he was first making The Band tape, hair down the middle of his back and one or two girls from Queens College or Adelphi, wherever, rubbing against him and his bell-bottom jeans as they danced in Nassau Coliseum. I want you to help me find out who is doing this and why, Cynthia said, and it was clear she wasn’t going to leave any time soon.

Comment [10]

April 25, 2008

NB: Reader Murder Feedback Welcome

Yes, please: your ideas, additions, twists, red herrings, plot points are all welcome and it would be a delight (expected, but don’t most real delights fall under that heading?) to see what might happen at Hillborne with your writerly, editorial, and readerly suggestions.

Comment [5]

April 24, 2008

Murder III: Cui Bono?

Even those who liked Mann’s set of universal truths had a hard time spending time with him. His wet, rheumy eyes fixed on his listener and he had a habit of leaning forward so that his breath, full of Chivas, coffee, and pipe, would be warm on the face. His physical presence was as overbearing as his ideology and as difficult to overlook.

Many theories were offered as the fact and the manner of his death spread through campus. Secretaries laughed and even the occasional dean seemed relieved to be rid of the embarrassingly popular Mann. He was an anachronism, blight on the liberal facade of the grand old institution. He had been known to refer to Hillborne as Mann’s Men’s School when drinking down in Marble Grill, toasting the murals of naked native girls that lined those venerable walls. Maybe somebody cut into him just to show that it was true that Mann had no heart at all, laughed the workers at the word-processing center, all of whom were women. Their laughter rang through the granite walls of the building’s basement where they worked for minimum wage.

Mann had no children. His ex-wife had long since remarried and moved to Chicago. He had only one sibling, a sister who lived on Chestnut Street and taught at one of the few remaining finishing schools (not that it called itself a “finishing school” any longer) for girls of the New England ancestry, one that frowned with pursed lips upon admitting those remarkable students from Japan and Dubai and Colombia and Saudi Arabia whose parents seemed so eager for them to attend school in Boston. Constance Rosamund Mann-Blatt (she adored her long name and was apt to be known only by parts of it) was vacationing in London at the time of her brother’s death. She sent a telegram in reply to the rude telephone call placed by the college president, a call that awakened her from a dream during which she was about to take tea at St. James’s. Deaths should be announced by telegram. Everyone knew that. She remembered that the college president wasn’t exactly a native New Englander (referring to him in unprintable terms, to be honest) and she forgave him as far as she could. She was to inherit monies Mann did not bequest to the college and she knew that would be precious little. News of her brother’s death did not ruin — or make — Constance Rosamund’s day.

Mann, principle heir to his father’s cigar-manufacturing fortune, left more than $1,875,000 to be used by the college in establishing a scholarship in his name. The requirements set out by Mann for the winner of the scholarship were as particular as he could make them, knowing full well he could not officially indicate that the money had to go to a tall, white, male English major. The endowment would allow a student majoring in American Literature to devote his time to the study of Whitman, Emerson, or Melville free from worries about cash: He would win a handsome $35,000-a-year fellowship, renewable for up to two years. He had to remain a full-time, unmarried student whose grade-point average remained above 3.3 (Mann thought overly intellectual students a bore and himself never received above an A- on an undergraduate paper during his years at Hillborne after the war), and the student had to produce a publishable paper on one of the three authors, but which could also serve as his senior thesis. “America is a country of young men,” declared Mann in his will, quoting Emerson. “I hope that the college will remember this truth in the years to come.”

Was anyone unhappy that Mann was dead?

Apparently not.

Mann had no lovers, few friends, and his undergraduate admirers were already drinking heavily on the Friday afternoon after his death because it coincided with homecoming weekend. One could hardly expect them to mourn. The members of fraternity row, male and female alike, did however drink deeply and well to Mann’s memory and made many jokes concerning his name and speculated on other attributes.

His killer was not repentant. Not in the least bit. Not at all. The killer drank a silent toast to a deed well and truly done. Thinking of Emerson, in fact, the killer mused on one of the poet’s lines — that the reward of a thing well done, is to have done it.

And so, rewarding himself, Mann’s killer drank again.

Comment [13]

April 23, 2008

Murder Mystery Part II: Suspects

Who else saw the body before the police arrived on that Friday afternoon? Professor Cynthia Maxwell passed by Mann’s door but could hardly have been expected to stop in for a chat. She and Mann were enemies of the deadliest sort. Maxwell’s office was directly above Mann’s in the Satis Library, and she was in her rooms briefly during the time Mann’s body lay, inert and silent, under her. Mann himself might have argued that she was used to men lying inert and silent under her. Professor Maxwell claimed not to notice anything unusual that November afternoon. So in fact we should note that Cynthia, sometimes-sweet-sometimes-steely Cynthia, did not admit to seeing the body although God knows she would have enjoyed it had she done so.

Another person who might have seen but said he did not see was Hillborne’s favorite boy. Mann’s star Carrol (Kicker) Prescott III, president of Tau Iota Delta, quarterback of the Hillborne football team and a surprisingly dedicated English major, stopped by during Mann’s office hours and knocked on the door. He was not told to enter and so did not enter, being a product of a private secondary school in Connecticut and a young man given to politeness when dealing with adults. This according to Kicker during his initial interview with the police. Kicker — nobody ever called him Carrol — simply went on to his next appointment, meeting Muffy McCoy for a sandwich at Christian’s, a nearby restaurant. Muffy was only to happy too see Kicker sooner rather than later, her taffy-colored pony-tail practically standing up on end when he sat down beside her. Her toes curled inside her pink sneakers. Her hazel eyes noticed how Kicker’s hands were shaking or rather, she would have noticed, had she any insight at all.

Also not saying they saw the body are the only other faculty members on the premises. Professors Vera Campbell, Washington Jefferies, and Ahmed Farouk, although in Satis Library, were in a committee meeting sorting through applications for a graduate scholarship that would send the winner to Britain for a year of study. The choice seemed clear: Either send Gail Marshall and be honest or send Mark Johnson and be good. Gail’s father was president of the largest supermarket chain in the USA and she went to London at least twice a year and had done since she could remember. Marks Johnson’s father was a delivery man in White River Junction and Mark had never been out of New Hampshire. Gail’s grade point average was a full point higher than Mark’s. There was much to decide in the hour of their meeting and although each of the professors had left to go to the bathroom, get coffee, or grab a cigarette, they did not have time, surely, to do any harm. Surely not someone as formidable as Mann. Surely not enough time to cut out his heart.

The only other figure of interest, Professor John Vincento, had just returned from visiting his lover, not quite his girlfriend, in Boston. Maria had made it clear years ago that she would keep her job at a community college and, tempted as John was to leave Arborville, he could not bring himself to give up tenure, prestige, and the fresh faces of new adoring and yes, yes, rich girls every semester. They managed to see one another frequently. John, driving his 1999 black Toyota down the Boston road through a tangle of BMW’s, Audis, and Volvos, could get to Maria’s apartment in Somerville in two hours flat. The arrangement worked well for the time being, and until John could publish The Great Browning Book (known by his friends as TGBB) he could not hope of getting another job. Charming, jovial, and fairly diligent, John was not known by others as the ambitious man he regarded himself as being. Someday his arguments would jolt Victorian scholars out of their complacency, but meanwhile he couldn’t be bothered submitting to lesser journals, and the greater journals found too many faults with his textual theories to accept the three articles he mailed out, routinely, every two years with the hope that the old readers would have died with new, more adventurous ones replacing them.

John did indeed see Mann’s body, but only as the county coroner was carting it away, and then only in time to see the sheet fall briefly away from the mottled, angry face.

How did Mann die? He was strangled. It looked as if he was strangled by his old school tie (an obscure, unworthy parochial school defunct now for many years but for which Mann demonstrated an uncharacteristic fondness). The manner of the murder indicated strength and dexterity on the part of the perpetrator.

Mann’s heart must have been cut out while rigor was fairly well established, according to the coroner’s reports, at least six or seven hours after the actual time of death. The operation removing the heart would have been messy, true, but not nearly as messy as it would have been had the heart still been pumping blood. That would have been easy enough to trace, blood from Lampe Hall to the Stane Cluster dorms if it had been done when he was alive. Why do it after he was dead? Why do it at all? Surely it was a complex feat, rather more difficult but along the same lines as getting the best of a lobster. A terrible sort of sick prank? A deeply unbalanced act? A final, fitting literalization of how many conceived of the man even before he died?

A project for an art class?

Comment [16]

April 22, 2008

An End-of-Semester Murder Mystery: Part One

PART ONE: Death of The Hillborne Mann

Professor Mann was known as The Hillborne Mann by uninspired colleagues and inspired undergraduate students alike. While Mann’s colleagues in the English Department employed the phrase to sum up the narrow, misogynist tendencies of his intellectual and social abilities, the typical undergraduate used it as high praise. Mann’s great height, great breadth and broad features, given to much redness of face after any excess, are all currently rather unimpressive. But this is not surprising. The original Hillborne Man is dead.

Known for his heartlessness, Mann is quite literally heartless, that organ having been removed from his chest cavity. All of this has been rather neatly done, however, so that his appearance does not betray the deeper absence. His heartlessness is obscured by the ratty-nattiness of his Harris tweed jacket.

Who finds the body, as Mann will be known in the future to certain segments of the college and town population? The body is found by Thaddeus Leach, professor of medieval literature, colleague and occasional supporter of Mann in the English department. Leach knocks on the heavy, dark, polished wood of Mann’s office door in the Satis Library and enters, as is the custom in this old and respected institution. Leach, known to his friends but not to his students (or so he assumes) as Winkie, sees Mann, upright and rigid in his enormous leather chair, eyes closed: quite embarrassingly dead. Winkie goes rather pale himself. His fatty 55-year-old medieval heart not used to such shocks. He sits in the small, uneasy chair used by the rare student who has been unable to avoid seeing Mann face to face.

Not that Mann wasn’t popular. Quite the opposite. Fraternities, even some sororities, would make sure that their numbers packed into Mann’s classes on American literature and, to be fair, not only because successful papers were carefully filed in frat house libraries, there to be copied easily and passed in for a good grade. Whoop and holler, these good students would, when Mann pointed out such facts as validated their own central beliefs, the following being a summary of these: women don’t write well and aren’t very smart after all; men of color are useful as characters in literary works (see Twain, see Faulkner, see Wolfe) but not of much use anywhere at a college except on the sports field; foreigners, rich or simply well-off, are vital to the college coffers but nevertheless should be pitied and avoided; big men are better than small men.

He was often given to adaptations of well-known literary clichés. For example, paraphrasing Samuel Johnson, Mann would claim that “nobody but a fool ever married but for money.” (Mann was married and divorced). Paraphrasing Eliot, Mann would say that the “world would end not with a bang but with the wimps.” Oh, how the freshman fraternity boys liked that one, hating wimps as they did, wimps being those freshmen boys not in fraternities. Mann was popular among, shall we say, a certain crowd and that crowd was large, visible, and vocal in Arborville.

So Winkie sat in the tiny chair for a few minutes before going back to his own office to phone the college police.

At least it was proven much later than Winkie’s fingerprints were not on Mann’s telephone.

…to be continued…

Comment [4]

April 19, 2008

Who Were You?

The hotel’s ballroom, set up for a seminar with a stage, a flip-chart, and thirty rows of folding chairs, is filled with dozens of women. Swarming around the coffee urn, carrying paper cups and napkins or hovering near the muffin-and-bagel tray, no one is yet seated although a number of bags, pocketbooks, and jackets are flung over the backs of chairs in a manner both territorial and insecure. Small yellow pencils without erasers of the kind only seen at conferences in hotels and cheap pads rest on every chair.

(A man passing by the open door would simply have shrugged his shoulders and kept walking. Perhaps he would have noticed the kaleidoscopic colors of the women’s clothing and heard the honeyed buzz of their conversations but there would be no reason for him even to pause as he strode briskly past the open double-doors. He wouldn’t have even needed to look at the sign, hand-lettered, announcing the title of this, the first paper at the conference.)

If we look more closely, though, we see that the women vary in age and manner.

There is the child bride who has only just traded in her parent’s house for her husband’s apartment and is now puzzled by the fact that this new, cramped world is hardly better. The wedding was perfect but the marriage surprises her; isn’t there something else meant to happen? She misses her old room at home—she still thinks of her parent’s address as home—and wonders about boys she had crushes on at school. Under the brittle icing of her life, she’s frantic.

There is the 22-year-old who finished college but has no idea what sort of permission or privilege this actually affords her, who pays back her loans carefully but has yet to realize any advantage from her education. She works in a bookstore and dreams about writing yet cannot bring herself to commit words to paper; since working at the store, she has lost the appetite to read. Instead she watches television in the evening and wanders through the apartment she shares with two other girls when they are gone.

There is the 25-year old who has spent the past four years tending two babies, who has a third on the way. Her sleep-deprived eyes and glazed smile betray the high-wire tension she feels as she rubs her stomach absentmindedly. She has not been out of the house alone, without her children or her husband, for months. She’s almost forgotten the fact that, even now, she has someone else with her.

And there are older women as well: one still young enough to hope that the disappointments may yet be made up for by the future and another who is terrified by the realization that the life she leads now is the bast she can expect. Then, over to the side, not quite listening to her companions, is the one who has dismissed all her illusions and waits for her lover to call and for her husband to leave, not necessarily in that order.

Bound by their restless appetites and uneasiness, these women, and others, many others, move through the room like like sharks in loosely organized groups, seeking one another out. They move silently on the mushroom-colored carpet, even though the room is filled with their talk, and they circle; they slip by one another as closely as possible without touching.

If we listen closely, we can hear what one woman says to another, these people who have just met. “I worry about my husband’s health but I also worry about whether he’s faithful. If he’s all mine, I want him to be healthy,” laughs the one wearing a silver silk shirt, dangling silver earrings, and black leggings. “If he’s fooling around, I hope every artery is as backed-up as the freeway on Friday afternoon.” Her companion, the one a brown pantsuit, smiles slightly and thinks about her own husband, who has just been rescued (she thinks of it as a rescue) from a relationship with a younger woman. He will never abandon her now. But how can she avoid the too-easy reproach, the too-smug possessiveness which threaten the rest of their days together?

The topic of this morning’s lecture, the opening one of the conference, is titled “Who Were You In Your Our Past Life?” Why are the women in this room, myself among them, hungry to know about our past but so apprehensive about our future?

Comment [11]

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