The Englishman (11 page)

“But, Anna, Anna Banana, you can’t always be the promising grad student. Now it’s time to be the badass prof. You gotta toughen up! What were you wearing?”

“Polka-dotted hammer pants and flip-flops. There is nothing badass about these petty power games and these malicious Machiavellian machinations!”

“Come on, Anna, you know that this is what college is like! What’s the big surprise?”

I pull my knees close to my chest in a gesture that reminds me of Jules Walsh.

“I want to be Anshel, the Yeshiva boy.”

“Like there ain’t no power play at a shul!”

“But I hate it so! I want to concentrate on my work, not on playing games!”

“Power games are part of your work. That’s the crucial thing you don’t understand. Start shmoozing, girl! You still believe that all you have to do is work hard and be nice and you’ll get the job, but eighty percent of it is connections!”

“I got this job.”

“Yes, and why? Because you shmoozed that guy Schermerhorn. Matterhorn. Horny Horn.”

“Hornberger.”

“Hornberger!” Irene squeals. “Dude! Work him—you said he liked you, and you need allies.”

“I do need allies, but he isn’t one of them. Two reasons: a) I think Horny Horn is having an affair with one of the teaching assistants, and b) the people I like here don’t like him. On the other hand, he is chair at the moment. And he’s the golden boy because he nabbed a huge sponsorship deal.”

“Your chair is a dirty old man who fucks grad students?” Once again, even pragmatic Irene is shocked.

“Oh, no, no, no, you have the wrong idea. He’s not young anymore, maybe fifty, but big, and he looks good, or looked, if you like that sort of thing. Bronzed, brawny, but evidently with some brains, or he wouldn’t be here. The worst I can say about Hornberger is that I think he’ll be inefficient. No, it’s that he’s under Dancey’s thumb.”

“Not that he has sex with students?”

“As long as that doesn’t make him corrupt, I couldn’t care less. Nobody cared that Clinton was having sex with his intern, did they? Until she blabbed and he committed perjury. But if I have Dancey against me, who is one of the most influential people in the place,
and
his buddy, the department chair—maybe I should start polishing my CV right away.”

“Don’t panic. Create your own alliances. Bert Scherer can’t stand me, but because I have the other senior partners on my side, I’m safe. Oh, I haven’t told you. They’re going to ask me to take over the Whettering case when Louise has her baby. Ed Barton told me yesterday.”

“Whoa—hey! Props to Irene! Congratulations!”

“It would be a nice feather in my cap if I brought that one home. And I will.” The tone of her voice leaves no doubt that she will. Irene usually gets what she wants.

“What does Jacques say?
On boit du champagne?”

“He says if I win that one, he’ll take me to
Per Se
for dinner.”

Perhaps this is where Irene and I most differ. I would prefer a boyfriend who takes me to a romantic restaurant when I get the case, not if I win it. There is a reason why Jacques and I never warmed to each other, even though he has been a fixture since he and Irene met in law school.

“So, who do you like?” she asks. “Among your colleagues. Who could be an ally?”

“Dunno.”

“C’mon, Anna, you gotta do better than that!”

“Tim Blundell—he does Brit Lit, too, he’s half English and—”

“English, huh? Does that set your little heart a-flutter?”

“Well, no, in view of the fact that he is as gay as Christmas, it doesn’t.”

“He is? Down there? Yikes. Won’t he get, like, fifty lashes and two years of hard labor if he’s caught
in flagrante?”

“Don’t be stupid.” I decide not to mention Tim’s closet. “Anyway, I like Tim, and he introduces me to people I like, on the whole. But he does shoot his mouth off about our colleagues, and although he makes me laugh, I’m worried that I’m getting in with the worst set of the school.”

“You want to be careful with that,” Irene agrees. “Stay out of trouble, find a powerful prof who’ll protect you, and a few people to hang out with. That’s all you need right now. Are you getting enough exercise?”

“Mm…”

“Well, do, Anna! Because the only thing I’m worried about is that you’ll work too hard and worry too much, panic, like you do, and then start an affair with, I dunno, a student, or the prez, or someone else totally inappropriate.
Like you do!”

“You make me sound like a Pavlovian bitch.”

“Just sayin’, babycakes. Take that bitch out for long runs, and she won’t show that stress-induced random mating behavior!”

“Irene, I wish you were here. So I could slap you!”

Chapter 7

“D
ON’T
L
ET
H
ER
B
OTHER
Y
OU
. She’s never been easy. Well, it’s not been easy for her, and that’s my fault, of course.”

All I said was that Jules came round to introduce herself to me. That was all it took for Karen Walsh to launch into a flood of apologies for her eldest daughter. It is Sunday afternoon, and Pop, Howie, and Grandma Shirley have driven off to see Shirley’s brother and his wife in the next big town beyond Shaftsboro, leaving Karen and the girls to hold the fort. I’ve done all my prep for next week, and I am too nervous to concentrate on any of my other projects. Anyway, why did I move into the country if I’m not going to befriend my neighbors?

Karen seemed happy to see me and offered to set aside the huge box of peas she is shelling, but I reassured her I didn’t mind at all and offered to help. She declined my offer as politely as it was given, and so I have a glass of cold tea in front of me and watch with considerable fascination how she twists the peas out of their pods with two flicks of her wrist.

“She didn’t bother me at all,” I reply diplomatically. “It’s just that I hadn’t…I hadn’t expected her.”

“No…she’s away a lot. Out.” Karen can probably shell peas in her sleep with one hand tied behind her back, but now she has her eyes trained on the green bowl in front of her. “She earns her monthly allowance picking, so she hangs out a lot with the students and the backpackers, and…well, I don’t like it, but there isn’t much I can do about it. I hope that when she’s old enough to drive, she’ll get a job in town, but of course my husband and my father-in-law want her to help on the farm.”

“She mentioned that she’d been to stay with her Dad.”

Karen glances up at me, and at first I take it to be a warning to back off, but it is in fact an expression of relief.

“Yes. I was married before, briefly. I was too young, and—well, she was an accident.”

I try to picture this wiry, self-effacing woman, with her lean, capable hands, when she was eighteen or nineteen. Pregnant, under pressure to marry, or maybe not even under pressure, maybe happy, and eager to have a family and a home.

Light-years away from my own experience.

“Why are you worried about her?”

The busy fingers stop and sink onto the wax tablecloth.

“Well—” But what she means is not,
Well, let me think
, but
Well, how long have you got?

“I mean, she’s a teenager,” I rush on. “She
has
to give you attitude.”

She smiles, but it is an unconvincing effort.

“I was a student at the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences,” she says. “I wanted to go into landscape contracting. Julianne’s father and I met as interns working at the state zoo. I was pregnant six weeks after we met, married two months later, and divorced after less than two years. Didn’t finish my degree, broke with my parents. I was working at the food market in town when Howie and I met. You can imagine that his parents were not pleased when he brought me home.”

“I don’t know. Degree or no degree, you must know a lot more about farming than other women Howie might have dated.” I’m still busy assimilating this new and unexpected information.

“Oh, yes, my father-in-law couldn’t hear enough about those fancy new ideas that people taught at college.” I didn’t think Karen Walsh capable of such withering sarcasm. But then I clearly underestimated her all round. “You’re right, she’s at a difficult age,” she agrees, changing the subject, “and nobody knows what she would be like if she wasn’t—you know. The odd one out. Don’t let her adopt you.”

“Adopt me?” I laugh, secretly relieved that Karen has identified what I suspect might become a problem.

“She has this thing about New York City. Of course she’s never been to a place larger than Shaftsboro, except once on a school trip to D.C. It’s all windmills. But if she makes a nuisance of herself, just tell me—oh, that’s the car. Listen, you’re welcome to stay for dinner, Anna.”

We look at each other for a moment and, I think, understand each other tolerably well. So I return to my desk for an hour, then change into a clean blouse and join a very polite Walsh family at the long wooden table in the garden, between the apple trees that are hanging heavy with fruit. There is fried chicken, which I have to decline, rosemary potatoes, pea mash, buttermilk biscuits, tomato and bean salad, and warm blueberry pie. I have more carbohydrates on my plate than Irene eats in a week.

“Are you happy with that, ma’am?” Pop Walsh nods skeptically at my food.

“I am, sir, thank you.” I’m not sure whether he is mocking me with the courtesy title, but I’m not taking any chances. Karen calls me Anna now, and so does Jules, who turns up late, and whose air of defiance I decode as worry that I may have squealed on her. I haven’t, but I’m still annoyed about the sticky puddle of cola on my porch, so I don’t reassure her with the smile she clearly hopes to catch from me. Instead, I stroke the dogs, of which there are two, Olive Oyl, the black giant schnauzer I met when I first came, and a chocolate-colored pointer called Jeanie, who is only moderately interested in me. Olive is still very much the exuberant puppy, with her paws on my thigh to see what I am about. I would indulge her, but the moment Pop spots her, he firmly orders her away from me.

“I don’t mind,” I assure him.

“But I do. We don’t spoil our dogs.”

I change tack, turning to Howie. “So tell me what I’m eating.”

He looks at me with that mixture of alarm and lack of comprehension typical of people addressed in a foreign language. He resembles his soft-featured mother more than his handsome father, but he is not an unattractive man. He is, however, a very quiet man. So far, I have exchanged precisely one word with him (“Hello.” “Hello…”), and I figure if I can’t get him to talk about tomatoes, I can’t get him to talk, period.

“Black cherries,” he says, poking at the contents of his bowl. “And Aunt Ruby’s, the green ones. Aunt Ruby’s German Greens. They’re both heirlooms.”

“Heirlooms? Sounds as if you should wear them round your neck. You know, like hippy beads.”

The twins stare at me, open-mouthed, and Jules gives me an appreciative grin.

“Far out,” she says. “For Goths. Black tomato necklace. You’d have juice dripping out, like blood…gory!”

“Julianne!” her mother reproves her, but without much emphasis. She is more concerned to rescue her husband. “‘Heirloom’ means it’s an old variety, a sort people used to grow in the old days, or that grew in the wild and were later cultivated. Not the sort produced by industrial farming.”

“So you produce both industrial and…um, heirloom vegetables? Is that why there’s an ‘organic’ sign at the top of the road?”

“It’s my hobby,” Karen says a little hastily, as if she was already taking up too much time talking about herself.

“Fruit,” Pop Walsh says. “Tomatoes are fruit.” He says it kindly, like an expert explains the basics of his discipline to a freshman, while he opens a bottle of beer and pours it for his son.

“It’s something to do with the seeds, isn’t it? If it has seeds, it’s a fruit?” I sound a little too eager to demonstrate my knowledge.

Pop looks straight down at the bottle opener in his hand, and I could swear he is amused, but his face hasn’t changed at all. “I never asked you whether you’d like a beer, ma’am,” he says. “It’s made locally in a small brewery.”

Is that another dig? Yankee tourist exploring the indigenous culture.

“Is it nice?” I ask, a little too politely.

He shrugs and reaches for my empty water glass and pours it half full, as if I am a child that is not yet allowed an adult-size portion. It almost makes me laugh. I wouldn’t want to be in Howie’s shoes for the world, or in Grandma Shirley’s, for that matter. On the other hand, I bet Shirley had a good time in bed with him. Maybe still has.

“It is nice,” I report after two sips. “Tangy.”

He gives Jules a quick nod and she trots off, meekly enough, to bring another bottle from the kitchen.

“Karen, will you share?” I ask her. “I’m worried if I have a whole bottle, I’ll be pleasantly plastered tonight, but useless in the morning.”