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About the Author
Gina Barreca is a professor of English and feminist theory at the University of Connecticut. Her books include They Used to Call Me Snow White, but I Drifted; Perfect Husbands and Other Fairy Tales; Babes in Boyland; and, with Gene Weingarten of The Washington Post, I'm With Stupid. She's written or edited other books on vice, Victorians and sex, American humor, the erotics of instruction, The Sopranos, women's humor, and Italian-American literature. She will blog about teaching, sex, humor, money, publishing, ambition, books, marriage, envy (professional and personal), politics (professional and personal), aging, and cartoons.
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The Professor's First Wife | Comment [7]
The Unsettling Idea of Settling | Comment [11]
Good Company: About Feminism and Various Sorts of Women | Comment [3]
Ranting About Feminism: Not That I'm Bitter (Part I) | Comment [38]
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Featured Articles By the Author
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.
Posted at 09:15:37 PM on April 28, 2008 | All postings by Gina BarrecaComments
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Previous: Murder Mystery IV: Pig Heart
Next: Murder Mystery VI: A Red Herring?
Some useful links on academic “mobbing” (hint – lots of this is going on in this murder mystery):
http://arts.uwaterloo.ca/~kwesthue/checklist.htm
This one is nice and eery: one can all too easily imagine “crows” in black academic attire swooping down to literally tear the heart out of their target: http://arts.uwaterloo.ca/~kwesthue/graz0701.htm
And here’s a nice “self-test” on the differences between “bullying” and “mobbing” (full of potentially useful analogies for a murder mystery): http://arts.uwaterloo.ca/~kwesthue/bullyingvsmobbing.htm
The main “mobbing” resources page link: http://arts.uwaterloo.ca/~kwesthue/mobbing.htm
As for me, I think I’ll get back to my coffee now….
— Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Apr 28, 09:46 PM · #
Probably not the place to say this, but all I can think after reading those last three sentences is: Emerson and Whitman, yuck.
— Kellan · Apr 29, 06:44 AM · #
Good heavens, Anti-hypocrisy, that page is about as creepy as this story so far. And a handy list to nip things in the bud should they veer that way, useful tool in real life. What a great summation of secret things that instill dread in collegiate life.
Gina, I’ve been wandering elsewhere for a while, what a marvelous thing to come back and find here. Deliciously snarky and emotively aware prose. Only now I’m caught up, I’m on the hook waiting for more instalments… _
— bta · Apr 29, 10:48 AM · #
Everything in this blog series is about the secret stuff in college life. More! Love it.
— m · Apr 29, 10:59 AM · #
A killer and a heart remover! Two different people! I love it! Looking forward to the next part!
— Jennifer · Apr 29, 11:37 AM · #
Poor Killer—doesn’t he/she know that those probably weren’t the only copies of his books? It’s like Bosie who destroys Des Profundis without realizing that Wilde had made copies. I like this section a lot, especially the secretary who hates to think ill of the dead “god rest his soul.” I laughed out loud…I also like the interplay of scenes. Fun times.
— Hannah · Apr 29, 02:16 PM · #
While all this is going on, what’s the administration’s reaction?
— Dimitri · Apr 29, 10:05 PM · #
Likes and dislikes.
My main gripe is that I don’t like that the killer tearing out pages containing sexual overtones in Mann’s books. It makes the killer seem like an easily offended grad student. Are we really killing a man here because his mind was in the gutter? And is this a killer, or is this a women’s studies student with tickets to Lilith Fair and a huge bush?
I like the discussion over beers as to what to do with Mann’s remains. And this line was great: Saturday morning brought out the alumni, most of whom had abandoned the fairly humiliating search for their youth sometime around midnight the previous evening.
I love the idea of a killer and a heart remover. It gives me hope that the heart thief is maybe not so touchy as the killer apparently is. But still, I doubt that.
— Harry Lime · May 8, 04:45 PM · #