On his first full day in his new job as chair of the Ogilvie College English department, John Grant kept going to the window to remind himself that he was really here, settling into an office that might well be his for the rest of his working life. A thought that would disturb some men, but one he found greatly satisfying, even comforting.
Lydia Montgomery was just leaving the building, headed toward town. She stopped to talk to two kids sitting on a bench, gesturing over her shoulder toward this very window. Students would start trickling in, now that word was out. John wondered if these two would come see him. Metal glinted from lips and eyebrows and nostrils, as though they were armored knights ready to do battle. They looked vaguely familiar, but he couldn’t place either of them. Her T-shirt read Rehab Is for Quitters, and his, Metallica. They would be good kids to have in a literature class, willing to ask hard questions and look beyond the words on the page.
Then an elderly woman came around a corner, erect of posture in spite of the cane she used, her face shadowed by the broad brim of a straw hat. A small dog trotted beside her, perky and watchful.
Lydia and the kids on the bench went very still as the old woman turned toward the library. Then they all relaxed visibly and John Grant, just as relieved to have escaped Miss Zula Bragg’s notice, retreated back into his new office. He had no business staring out of windows anyway, not with so much work to do. Standing in the middle of a canyon of moving boxes, he contemplated where he had landed, and realized two things.
First, a single summer was hardly enough to get settled into this job before the fall semester began; and second, he had help. This office would be orderly and organized within two days and he could get down to work, because as the chair of the largest department on campus he had an executive assistant and a secretarial staff. Of course he also had 19 full- and part-time faculty members, 120 undergraduate majors and 20 graduate students—all of whom he wanted to meet with—six un-staffed courses, and a disaster of a schedule to fix. He went out into the reception area.
“Rob?”
The woman behind the desk had teeth of an unnatural pure white, very small and very sharp.
“I’m covering the desk for him, Dr. Grant.”
She fawned; there was no other word for it. It was distracting, and might even fool a man who hadn’t grown up around southern women like her: a cross between Lucrezia Borgia and the Avon Lady. Bone and blood, with sugar on top.
John meant to smile. He wanted to smile, but the urge to retreat was so strong that the best he could produce was a quiver at the corner of his mouth.
He said, “Call me John.” It was easier than explaining, yet again, why he didn’t like being called “doctor.”
“Oh, I couldn’t.” She raised her hands to ward off the suggestion and then leaned forward to whisper. “Not in the
office
.”
A battle for another day, then. John said, “Where is Rob?”
“He’s out on an errand. But don’t worry, I’m under strict orders to make sure you get to your meeting in time. I saw Lydia Montgomery leaving just a minute ago. In’t it a pity?”
He could walk away, just extricate himself from the conversation, but this was a test of sorts. He said, “I don’t see any cause for pity. She’s here on a full merit scholarship, her writing samples are stellar, she’s got excellent plans for her education. She’s on her way to England to attend an invitation-only seminar for the summer. I’d say she’s got a bright future ahead of her.”
John looked Patty-Cake directly in the eye, daring her to drag out a coded phrase:
and her with such a sweet disposition;
or,
her mama is a big woman, too;
or,
in’t it lucky she’s got other gifts
.
After an uneasy moment while Patty-Cake sat with a frozen half smile on her face, John said, “I better get myself organized. No calls, please.” He stepped backward. “Thank you, Miss Walker.”
She said, “Dr. Grant, you know everybody around here calls me Patty-Cake. Except Caroline, of course, she calls me Aunt Patty-Cake. You could call me Aunt Patty-Cake if you like, seeing as how we’re going to be related and all? Why—”
“Excuse me.”
She stopped in midsentence and blinked at him.
“I’ve got some things to go over before the meeting.”
All those white teeth. He showed her his own, and then retreated, contemplating the mysteries of genetics and the one thing that might keep him from actually marrying Caroline Rose. Tall, elegant, quiet Caroline Rose, a medievalist of international standing, was related to Patty-Cake Walker by blood.
John closed the door firmly behind himself.
“You look like Saint George after his first run at the dragon.”
John let out an undignified yelp. His brother was sitting behind the desk, leaning back with his hands behind his head.
He said, “Shit, you scared me. I locked that door, I know I did.”
“Shhhhh. Patty-Cake will hear you.” Rob held up the key to the private entrance between two fingers. “A good executive assistant knows where all the keys are hidden.”
“A good executive assistant doesn’t hide from the office staff,” John said.
Rob began to sort through a pile of mail. “And yet, here I sit, shaking in my boots.”
John flopped down on the ratty green velvet couch. It was his favorite piece of furniture in the office: as big as a boat and lumpy in all the right places. He sorted through the pillows, rejected one painted with the likeness of Robert E. Lee and another with Elvis embroidered in beads. He finally found what he was looking for, a pillow that made no aesthetic or political or historical statements, and pulled it over his face.
Rob said, “She’s been grilling me about you, has our Patty-Cake. And so has everybody else I’ve come across, from the janitor to the gardeners.”
“You knew that would happen. I’m an outsider.”
Rob snorted at that. “You’re Lucy Ogilvie’s firstborn son, that’s what makes you so interesting.”
John couldn’t argue that point. Their mother had been born an Ogilvie, a great-great-great-granddaughter of one of the two brothers who had founded the town and the university itself. Lucy Ogilvie might have married a Yankee with the unfortunate last name of Grant, but she had brought her boys home to spend every summer right here. Then Rob had done the right thing and settled in Ogilvie, although he had found a way to do it that confounded every reasonable expectation. Now that John had followed that good example and turned his back on the North, there was real hope for the Grant boys.
“What Patty-Cake wanted to know,” Rob went on, “is if y’all have decided on whether or not to settle down at Old Roses once you get married, because then you’ll need a decorator, and Patty-Cake—”
“Christ,” John said, burrowing deeper into the couch. “The woman is relentless.”
Rob came over to drop a pile of folders on his chest.
“I told her you were the big, strong silent type who left all those little details to the bride and her four capable sisters.”
“Good strategy.” When he had made a bundle of the files he said, “What is all this, anyway?”
“For your meeting with the regents. You go from seeing the dean of student life directly to your lunch meeting. Your briefcase is by the door.”
John pulled himself up out of the depths of the couch. “I love it when you talk executive. Faculty club?”
Rob said, “The regents never eat at the faculty club. Thomasina’s. And come right back after,” he added, making herding gestures toward the door. “You’ve got a one o’clock with the registrar.”
“Hey,” John said, “I got here three months early specifically to avoid a panic. Why the rush?”
Rob snorted. “All these years in academia, you should know the way things work. Where there’s a free slot in any schedule, a meeting will be created to fill it. Nature abhors a vacuum and all that.”
“In other words, I’ve landed in a black hole.”
“You wouldn’t be happy any other way,” Rob said, opening the door. “And you know it.”
Patty-Cake Walker stood there, and just beyond her, Miss Zula Bragg and her dog. Miss Zula, who had once seemed the tallest woman in the world, had begun to fold in on herself with age, but the expression in her eyes was as alarmingly astute as ever.
“Miss Zula,” John said, sure that his voice must crack, “what a nice—”
“John,” said the old woman. “A word, if you please. Louie.” She pointed with her cane, and the dog trotted into the office ahead of her.
Patty-Cake said, “Dr. Grant, I tried to tell Miss Zula that you have an important meeting—”
“Not that important. Come in, Miss Zula, please. Rob, would you get some tea and call the dean to reschedule? Thank you, Ms. Walker, that will be all.”
Patty-Cake drew in a sharp breath but she slipped away without protest, Rob just behind her. That left John alone with a seventy-five-year-old woman who had once been the bane of his existence, and who promised to take up that role again, now that he had come back to Ogilvie.
She said, “You’ve gone and thrown your little brother to the lions, John.”
John pulled out one of the deep leather chairs for her. “Rob can take care of himself. I was planning to come by to see you this afternoon. I haven’t been here forty-eight hours yet.”
Miss Zula ignored the chair and walked to the couch, where she settled herself with her gloved hands folded over the head of her cane. Louie jumped up beside her. He had one blue eye and one brown and a companionable way about him. Miss Zula’s dogs always did; she would no more tolerate a surly dog than she would a whining undergraduate.
For a long moment she studied John. Silence was her usual response to excuses; it was amazing how a remorseful student would respond to it by digging himself deeper and deeper into a hole. It was an excellent trick, one of many John had borrowed from Miss Zula to good effect in his own teaching career. But he wasn’t a student anymore, and he couldn’t let himself be intimidated by her, not if he wanted to make a success of this job. That meant working with Miss Zula, who had never found the right moment to retire from teaching, although her doctor—who happened to be her nephew—was constantly after her to do just that.
She said, “Bubba’s waiting for you, is he?” Miss Zula was the only person John knew who dared to call the head of the board of regents by his boyhood nickname.
“I’m not concerned,” John said.
Miss Zula snorted softly. “You’re as bad a liar now as you were as a boy, John Grant. Of course you’re worried. You have to go in there and tell them that I don’t want anything to do with their party.”
John’s eyes strayed to the posters pinned to the board behind the couch and just above her head. There were ten of them, one of which would be chosen as the official announcement for next spring’s celebration. The undergraduates had already come up with their own name for it: the Bragg Bash. A hundred fifty years for the university was not nearly as interesting as the fact that next June would be the fiftieth anniversary of Zula Bragg’s graduation from Ogilvie. Its first black woman graduate, its brightest star, the recipient of every literary prize ever given, this elderly black woman with beetle-dark eyes. In her flowered dress and straw hat and white gloves she looked more the part of a church organist, but she had produced some of the country’s greatest literature.
The Regents were so busy contemplating the media attention, the free publicity, and the bump-up to the endowment that they had forgotten to reckon with Miss Zula’s dislike of fuss.
“It’s the nature of the beast,” John said. “I disappoint them, and they cut my budget. Sometimes the order is reversed.”
She pushed out an irritated breath, her brow drawn down to a deep V. “Do you think you got this job because they have the idea you know how to deal with me?”
John laughed at that. “Not even the regents are that blind, Miss Zula. You’ll do exactly what you want. You always have. And I got this job on my merits.”
“But why did you want it to start with, that’s the question.” She was looking at him closely, her eyes slightly narrowed, as if with enough effort she could see into his head.