I had no answers to such questions. I just kept working. I had no outside contact, no intrusive stimuli bar the news on the radio. Reduce everything down to certain essentials and you can live a very agreeable existence – as long as you also choose not to risk anything.
However, guilt made me phone my mother once during my time away. I began the call by breaking the news about my departure from Freedom Mutual. Her reaction was classic: ‘Your father will be so disappointed. He would so have liked you to have succeeded for a change.’
As per usual, I said nothing, swallowing my rage, and instead told her what I was doing up here.
‘I suppose that fills the days, dear,’ she said. ‘You will send our library a copy if it gets published?’
‘You can count on that, Mom.’
A silence. Then: ‘I’m very cross at you about something, Jane.’
‘What might that be?’
‘I had two gentlemen from the FBI stop by the library asking to see me. It seems your father has been wrongly accused in some financial swindle thing . . .’
‘Wrongly accused?’ I heard myself saying.
‘Don’t sound so suspicious. Your father is a brilliant businessman.’
‘My father is a crook.’
‘So you believed everything the FBI told you.’
‘How did you know that—’
‘An Agent Ames informed me that they interviewed you – and that you filled them in on everything you knew about your father’s business dealings.’
‘Which wasn’t very much.’
‘You still cooperated.’
‘They were the FBI, Mom. I mean, the man cheated his friends and then cheated me out of ten thousand dollars—’
‘I’m not listening to this.’
‘Of course not. That would be too goddamn painful – to admit the truth. Because that would mean admitting—’
‘I’m hanging up now.’
‘Dad’s dishonesty cost me my job.’
‘Don’t you go trying to blame him for—’
‘
Blame him! Blame him?
Didn’t the Feds tell you—?’
‘They told me a lot of half-truths – and asked if I had heard from him. Now it seems he’s on the run because of your—’
That’s when I clicked my phone shut. I did what I only could do when furious with the world. I went back to work.
For the next four days I upped my daily writing hours to eight, continuing to be ruthless with the text, relentlessly working my way towards the end.
I tried to keep focused on the task in hand but, as much as I also kept trying to blank him from my mind’s eye, my father’s image continued to plague me. Since his disappearance, I had often speculated on where he might be now. Was he living under an assumed name in some South American beach dive? Might he have changed his physical identity, bought himself a Uruguayan passport and found himself some twenty-year-old
puta
with whom he could hide out? Or maybe he had snuck himself back into the States and – using a bogus social security number – was now eking out a living in some faceless sprawl of a city.
How I wanted to kill all thoughts of him. But can you ever excise a bad parent? Though you might come to terms with all that they have psychologically bequeathed you, they can never really be expunged. They’re the stubborn, permanent stain that will never entirely vanish in the wash.
However, rage can have its benefits if you can use its toxicity to propel you forward. So the eight-hour writing days extended to ten and I also found myself working half the night when insomnia started snapping me awake at three in the morning. For the rest of the week, I slept no more than five hours a night. Barring my two daily walks on the beach – and the very occasional trip to the local shop for supplies – I ground on with the rewrite.
The end came at six in the evening on the third Sunday. I typed the last sentence and stared at the laptop screen for a few dazed minutes, thinking:
And after all that, it will never find its way between hard covers
. But at least it was done.
The next morning, after breakfast and the usual sunset beach hike, I climbed into my car and drove into Halifax. My first port of call was an internet café on the Spring Garden Road. My email inbox was pretty damn empty – a three-line communiqué from my mother: ‘
I do hope you have stopped holding a grudge against me. You seem to fly off the handle at everything I say. I would appreciate a call . . .
’ Not likely. A reassuring email from Dwight Hale: ‘
The Bureau does not seem interested in questioning you any further about your time at Freedom Mutual, so return home whenever you feel like it.
’ A fast hello from Christy: ‘
What’s with the disappearing act? A word or two about your whereabouts and well-being would be appreciated.
’ And the following from the Harvard Placement Office:
Dear Ms Howard
We notice that you have recently re-registered with us as a candidate for an academic posting. Could you please call us as soon as possible to discuss a position that has just opened at the last minute in the English department at New England State University.
Sincerely yours
Margaret Noonan
I gnawed on my lip when I read the words
New England State University
, as it was a third-tier place, favored by the sort of kids who either goofed off entirely in high school and/or were determined to do so in college. But . . . it was a job opening. Despite all that money in the bank, I kept telling myself I needed a job, which is why I had sent an email to Harvard a week earlier, saying I was in the market for an academic post. Because how could I do anything risky like take a year off to live in Paris – or bum my way around South America – when a job at a minor league university (albeit in Boston) was up for grabs?
Sitting there in that internet café on a gray morning in Halifax I could see, laid out in front of me, the course of action I shouldn’t take: making the call to Margaret Noonan, arriving back in Boston, doing the interview, starting straight away as a full-time professor, and repenting at leisure for having steered myself into a professional cul-de-sac.
Don’t make that phone call to Harvard
, I told myself in that Halifax café. But I made the call. And I got the job. And as I accepted the job, I thought:
The lure of safety drags us into lives we’d prefer to dodge
.
Two
M
Y OFFICE AT
New England State University was in the basement of a dull concrete building. It was around eight by nine feet and had one half-window that was always streaked with dirt. Whatever low-level natural light entered the office was therefore always refracted through a prism of smudged glass. When it snowed – and it snowed a lot in Boston that winter – the window disappeared, and I was reduced to making do with the fluorescent tubes that provided most of the interior light.
‘I’m afraid the new member of the department always gets the Black Hole,’ Daniel Sanders told me after offering me the job.
The job was an assistant professorship in English. It had fallen open when its previous holder – a specialist in early-twentieth-century American literature named Deborah Holder – had died of a fast-acting stomach cancer that had killed her just three months after its initial diagnosis.
‘Debbie was genuinely loved by everyone in the department,’ Sanders told me during our post-interview lunch. ‘She was just thirty-one, married with a young son, hugely popular with her students, and someone who genuinely had a major academic future ahead of her. She was a star – and nice on top of it. I am probably being very impolitic here by telling you all this, but I’d rather you be aware of the size of the shoes you are about to fill than find out through all the usual interdepartmental whispers just how loved she was.’
‘I appreciate your directness.’
‘That’s my style. That’s why I’m also going to be very direct with you right now about several other things. As you know this is a tenure-track job. But you definitely won’t be granted tenure unless you get a book published within the next four years – and with a reasonably high-level academic press. So you really must get the book between hard covers as quickly as possible.
‘The second thing I have to tell you is this: everyone in this department knows that you were romantically involved with David Henry.’
‘I see,’ I finally said, telling myself that I was a fool to think that nobody at New England would have been tipped off about this most gossip-worthy part of my past history.
‘I am not telling you this to make you feel uncomfortable, nor to pass any judgment on you. You should know that, in the course of the assessment process, I did speak to Professor Hawthorden at Harvard. He only had excellent things to say about you – but I did ask him directly if your involvement with David Henry caused problems for him or other members of the department. He informed me that you were very discreet about it.’
‘It’s in the past, Professor,’ I said, interrupting him. ‘And I hope I will not be defined within this department by something that was very private, that was never discussed with
anyone
, and that had no bearing whatsoever on my doctoral thesis—’
‘Which was considered a first-rate piece of work,’ he said, completing the sentence. ‘I wouldn’t be offering you this job if I didn’t know that, or if I wasn’t also aware that you consider this “relationship” now historical and not to be repeated in the future.’
‘What happened with Professor Henry would never be repeated again, sir.’
Yet again I was finding out one of the most fundamental rules of life: the repercussions of the past always rumble underneath everything. If you’re lucky the rumblings are only heard by yourself in that most private of realms, your conscience. But if your private life tips into the public domain, you will always be reminded of its shadow and the suspicions it tosses up about you.
Professor Sanders decided that my assurances were worth the gamble. Once I offered them, he told me I had the job – as long as I could start four days from now on Monday.
‘No problem, but I do need to see everything that Professor Holder was lecturing on.’
That afternoon I was ushered into Deborah Holder’s office. It looked as though it was still fully occupied. Standing in the doorway with Professor Sanders I took in its crammed bookcases and noticed what seemed to be first editions of Emily Dickinson and Sinclair Lewis, stacks of papers, a framed poster of the Paris Métro system, and a bulletin board crammed with photographs. They were all family snaps. Deborah Holder had been a pretty woman with pulled-back black hair and an easy smile. Judging from the photos her sartorial style was Shetland sweaters and blue jeans, as was that of the bearded thirty-something man who shared so many of the photographs with her. Then there was her little boy, seen in these snaps at various stages of early development, the last of these showing him around the age of four, his arms draped around a mother now drawn and pale, her hairless head part-covered by a scarf.
I took in all the incidental office details. Everything here hinted at a life still in full swing. It was as if Deborah Holder had just stepped away from it all for a few minutes and fully expected to return to it any moment. Professor Sanders must have been reading my thoughts as he said: ‘She’d checked herself out of Mass General after the last course of chemotherapy, insisting that she was well enough to teach. As it turned out, she’d only left the hospital when she was told there was nothing more they could do for her. But she was determined to go back to her students and kept the diagnosis from everyone.
‘Now, we could have her husband clear everything out of here for you, I suppose, if you really didn’t want to work in the Black Hole . . . That office is not as spacious. In fact, it’s downright poky. But—’
‘I’ll take it.’
Sanders nodded his approval, then motioned me to follow him out of there and into his own office. It was a large room with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, a venerable oak desk, framed Hogarth prints of eighteenth-century London (his area of expertise was Swift and his contemporaries), a worn Persian rug covering the institutional linoleum on the floor. He motioned for me to take the wing-chair that fronted his desk.
‘I don’t know about you, but I could definitely use a stiff whisky. Going into Deborah’s office . . .’
He let the sentence drop.
‘I wouldn’t say no to one,’ I told him.
Sanders opened a filing cabinet and pulled out a bottle of Teacher’s and two glasses.
‘Very Philip Marlowe,
n’est-ce pas
?’ he said, pouring me two fingers.
‘I didn’t know Raymond Chandler was one of your specialties,’ I said, accepting the glass.
‘He isn’t. I made the mistake of getting locked into the epoch of George III,’ he said. ‘At least you are dealing with something more concrete, more recent, more about what we grapple with in this country.’
‘Does everything have to have immediate contemporary relevance?’ I asked, clinking glasses with him.
‘According to the philistinic fools who sit on the board of this university . . . well, they don’t see any point in finding additional funding for the humanities, let alone those that address times past. But, sorry, I’m starting to rant.’
‘There’s nothing to apologize about. Your anger sounds very justified.’
‘You went to Smith and Harvard, so you must understand that your undergraduate students at New England State will largely have been C students in high school, and will not dazzle you with their insights into
Sister Carrie
. Having said that, given the insane competition for places in the Ivy League and the better liberal-arts colleges, we are getting a somewhat improved level of undergraduate – by which I mean uninspired, but not altogether stupid – and I think I’m starting to rant again . . .’
He opened a desk drawer and pulled out three hefty files.
‘Here are Debbie Holder’s lecture notes. You are going to have quite a long weekend ahead of you if you want to be ready to face your students Monday morning.’