The Englishman (12 page)

“Oh, I—” She exchanges an uneasy glance with Howie, who looks down at his plate. “No, thanks, I better not.”

Grandma Shirley looks up from her piece of chicken with a sudden alertness that clashes with her usual, quiet demeanor, and even Pop sits up in his chair as if he had heard the sound of the cavalry in the distance.

“I might as well tell you, too, Anna—I’m…expecting. It’s early days yet, so…I have to be careful. No alcohol, no coffee. No coffee is worse, to tell you the truth.” She giggles a little, but to me it sounds nervous rather than delighted. Not everyone is cheered by the good news. The twins seem oblivious, but Jules is chewing her food as if it had been sitting on the counter for a week and begun to smell. I am very careful not to catch her eye, precisely because my instinct is to side with her.

Pop lifts his glass.

“God is good. If he wills it—here’s to Howard Walsh III!”

My smile is as broad as anyone’s, and I drink before I realize that this was not a joke. Pop Walsh is casting Karen’s undeveloped fetus as the—apparently long-awaited—Calderbrook tomato princeling. In an urgent undertone Shirley asks Karen for details, while Pop and Howie sort out some farm business; I suspect that both the women and the men are channeling the same anxieties. I feel so much like an outsider that I take refuge in starting a conversation with Jules about her driving instruction. It is as if my affinity with the teenage girl struggling to leave home was stronger than my affinity with the adults who have made theirs. I have no home yet, nor am I sure how I would know if I had.

Home is where the heart is.

Well, in that case my home is my desk.

One of the twins—I can’t tell them apart at all; they are both fair and pudgy—kept a beady eye on me while her grandfather was saying grace, and when the hubbub about the new baby has calmed down, she looks over.

“Doctor…will you come to church with us next Sunday?”

She is old enough to know that this is a charged question, but it is not a rhetorical one.

“I’m afraid not, no.”

She gets a nudge from her sister, whose face is a study in curiosity and mischief.

“Do you go to another church? Are you a Catholic?”

“Dolly…” Karen makes a half-hearted attempt.

Since deflection fails, I go for the full frontal.

“No, I’m not a Christian at all. I’m Jewish.”

This information shuts them up for about half a minute.

“What, like—in the Bible, like the Jews who—” Dolly blushes up to the roots of her wheaten hair at what she doesn’t have the courage to say.

“The Lord Jesus was a Jew.” Pop Walsh speaks, and no prophet addressing the Children of Israel ever had as
shtum
an audience. “And so were his mother Mary, and Joseph, and all the disciples.”

“But—”

A glance from those steely eyes quells Dolly as effectively as it would have quelled me, but Grandma Shirley seems to rate the twins’ spiritual enlightenment higher than the adults’ embarrassment.

“Howard, if they have questions about the Bible, I think they should be allowed to ask.”

He considers his wife’s mild but firm intervention.

“Well—what’s your question, Dolly?”

The twins have been feverishly exchanging views under their breaths and Dolly rises to the occasion.

“If Jesus and Joseph and Mary were Jews, why are we Christians?”

Go on, Solomon
, I think grimly.
Do your shtick.

“You should know the answer to that one,” he replies without hesitation. “You know that your Grandma’s father brought his family to this part of the world from the west of Germany?”

They nod.

“My great-grandfather came from County Antrim in Ireland. So why are we Americans, even though our families used to be German, in Grandma’s case, and Irish and Scottish, in my case?”

While the girls are trying to negotiate this masterly bluff, I wait to see whether the blue eyes will glance over at me. They do, and I have to grin.
Well done, Pop.

“Lieberman is a German name?” Grandma Shirley makes her statement sound like a question.

“Well, sort of. My father’s family came from Warsaw, about a century ago.”

“Ah, so that was…before…”

“Yes, in nineteen oh-six. But my grandmother’s family escaped from Hamburg in thirty-five.”

“Why did she have to escape?” Jenny has picked up the shift in the atmosphere and it makes her uncomfortable. Her question releases a chorus of sighs in the room, and Jules roughly elbows her in the ribs.

“Dumbass!” she hisses under her breath. “
Hitler!”

“Oww! Who is Hettler? Dad, Jules hit me!”

In a concerted effort, Karen and Shirley start planning their trip to Georgia, where they are going to spend Thanksgiving week with Howie’s sister and her family. The girls quietly spoon their blueberry pie and occasionally glance up with a mixture of speculation and rancor that has, I think, much to do with my withholding the story of my adventurous grandmother, who made a dare-devil escape from Germany pursued by a villain called Hettler.

“I hope you didn’t hate it!” Karen whispers urgently when she sees me off an hour later amidst a flood of apologies. Of course I didn’t. What’s to hate? The food was delicious, the Walshes were civil, if not exactly friendly to me, and I found them fascinating to watch. My heart is at peace as I walk from the main house toward my cottage, which is a dark shape against the gray backdrop of the forest.

Oddly enough, I, too, am dealing with pregnancy. Academically. Not like Karen, who is breeding a child in her belly and will have to endure, for the next seven or eight months, her family’s fervent hope it may be a boy. What if it’s another girl? Here she is, her first daughter a beautiful teenager of mixed race, clearly even more confused about her identity than other fifteen-year-olds, and those blonde, rather unattractive twins. It would be better for all concerned if her next child was a boy.

I have never been pregnant, except possibly once for about eight hours, when Ciaran was too stoned to use the condom properly and I rushed off for a morning-after pill. I still feel about pregnancy and motherhood the way I felt about them when I was fourteen: I assume they will one day happen to me, but they would be unthinkable right now. While my mother went from dread that her daughter might get knocked up in college to the explicit appeal Not To Leave It Too Late, my own feelings on the subject have not changed at all. Have not
matured
at all, Mom would say if I gave her half a chance. Maybe she is right.

“Hey!”

A breathless form materializes in the dusk just as I’m about to step up to my porch.

“Jules! You startled me!”

“Sorry, sorry!” She is quietly panting. “I just wanted to say sorry about the other day. About the soda.”

“That’s okay. No harm done.” I feel sorry for her, but the last thing I want is to encourage her to make me her Agony Aunt. I briefly touch her shoulder to make up for the neutral tone of my voice, and her face clears.

“So we’re okay?”

“Yes, Jules, we’re okay. Don’t worry. Good night!” I leave her standing in the dusk and firmly shut the door behind me.

For the first time since I fanned them out in a corner of the study, I go to squat over the medical textbook illustrations that I will talk about at a conference on Medieval and Early Modern Iconography at Notre Dame University in November.

My subject is drawings included in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century works on anatomy; the first verisimilar images of dissected human bodies ever to be made in Western Christian culture. Nearly everyone who first sees them goes “Ewww!” because these are no naïve, symmetrically schematic drawings. These are the walking dead who display the functions of their bodies with a lack of self-consciousness that is both grotesque and graceful: a muscleman who—the better to show off the play of his limbs—has flayed himself and is holding the knife in one hand and his own skin in the other; a skeleton that leans nonchalantly against a pedestal, its ankles crossed and elbows bent to allow the viewer to see its joints. Naked females, depicted in the pastoral or urban settings of classical antiquity, their legs lasciviously spread and their abdominal walls peeled away like negligées, who display their reproductive organs complete with little mannikins huddling in their wombs.

These dissected pregnant ladies—and the web of iconographic codes and biblical symbols in which they are embedded—are my main focus of research at this moment. I have a feeling that Pop Walsh, if I tried to explain my fascination, would laugh me out of town, and Karen would smile politely and count the weeks and days of her own term. We do live in very different worlds, but that does not mean we cannot share a tomato salad and a beer occasionally.

It is still warm, and I go to bed with the window open to the forest’s sounds of silence.

Chapter 8

“D
EAD
W
OMAN
W
ALKING
!” Tim cries under his breath as he guides me along the hall into the classroom wing.

I’m too jittery to be distracted by his ribbing. It took me half an hour to get dressed this morning, only to end up with the same clothes I had put on first: a silk-and-cotton A-line skirt in a dark reddish-brown, a floral print blouse with three-quarter sleeves, and—the secret’s in the shoes—red leather strap sandals with heels. In New York, I would have made sure to wear at least one black item of clothing, not because black is the New York uniform but because black exudes authority and makes you look older. But for some reason this morning I felt that black wouldn’t be the right choice for my Ardrossan students. Now I wish I was dressed in the armor of Edward, the Black Prince of Wales.

“Hang on, this is me.” Tim compares the number on the classroom door with the note in his folder. “Good luck! Oh, and Anna? You have to be gentler with our freshpeeps than with the scholarship kids from Brooklyn.”

“Oh, c’mon, Tim! Give me a little credit here.”

Walking into my classroom is like walking into an oven. The room has big south-facing windows that we will be glad of during the winter months but today, the thermometer by the main entrance of the Observatory already showed eighty-one degrees Farenheit when I arrived two hours ago. It is one of Murphy’s laws that central A/C invariably breaks down in the first teaching week of the semester.

Thirty-three young people are lounging in their chairs, some openly curious, whispering with their neighbors as I arrange my pen, books, lists, and hand-outs on the desk, others pretending to ignore me. After the comforting routine of taking attendance I explain that I will hand out and discuss the syllabus at the end of the session.

“First I’m going to be boringly predictable for a moment. I’ll try to be excitingly wild and erratic later on.” This earns me my first titters of amusement. “Can someone define the term ‘comedy’ for us?”

One finger shoots up; it belongs to a ginger-haired boy in the last row.

“Yes—Logan, isn’t it?”

“That’s me, ma’am. Could we open the door, ma’am, to—” He waves his hand around to signify circulation. There are a few giggles, but they are nervous giggles. I have been challenged, and it takes me a second to overcome an instinctive reluctance to teach my first class for anyone to hear who walks along the hallway.

“Sure, be my guest.” In subtle retaliation I remain where I am and smile my permission at him to stand up and walk over to the door himself.

Several of my prospective English majors are of the eager beaver variety, girls who always do their homework and don’t let the teacher down. The eager beavers may not produce flights of fancy but they do keep a class afloat. We sort out that the everyday use of the term “comedy” has to be distinguished from its scholarly use and that a comedy is not necessarily belly-laugh funny.

“Isn’t the difference that at the end of a tragedy everyone is dead, and at the end of a comedy everyone is married?” says a girl wearing a bandana to keep her bright blond curls out of her face.

“That’s a little simplistic, but yes, let’s work with this definition. How would you categorize, say,
Titanic
? The event was, we all agree, tragic. The hubris of one man leads to the death of hundreds. But how would we categorize the genre of the movie? Kate Winslet doesn’t get to marry Leo di Caprio; that seems to rule out comedy. But do you remember the narrative frame of the movie?”

A low murmur arises as they begin to get involved in the debate, and I inwardly sigh with relief. I think I’ve got them. I make eye contact for a quick second with bandana girl and grin at her; she grins back.

“Now. If at the center of drama is the conflict between Life and Death, except that in comedy Life prevails while in tragedy Death prevails—” the class hurriedly starts scribbling notes “—then comedy and tragedy are basically about the same issues, but in different…flavors. Different
modes
. Now, I’d like to turn two more corners with you, and then we’ll probably just have time to look at a very short text. Can we think about the origins of drama for a moment? Because I believe that an anthropological perspective will allow us to see even more clearly how comedy and tragedy are flip sides of the same coin.”