Death of a Department Chair: A Novel

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59 6 The great female moderns all created a parallel universe. There weren’t many accounts of untraditional women’s lives to chart their way: they wrote the books they wanted to read, and not only that, they wrote the lives they wanted to live. Bettina Graf, class lecture, “Virginia Woolf and the Modern Sensibility” On Friday Bettina brooded at her computer. She’d been stuck for two months on a section of her Virginia Woolf book, one comparing several stage and film adaptations of Orlando. She staggered to her feet, stiff and clumsy after hours glued to her chair. What was the point? Bloomsbury scholars spewed a continuous stream of verbiage from their ivory towers; the field was mobbed—did the world really need another critical study of this doubtless fascinating woman? Just yesterday she’d received a notice from a friend at Smith about an upcoming conference in June 2003, asking if she wanted to contribute a paper. Bettina envisioned the Woolfian armies swarming from both sides of the Atlantic toward Northampton, their earnest eyes agleam at the prospect of new discoveries about their idol’s life and work. And they wouldn’t be dissecting the new work by Bettina Sedon Graf, because she couldn’t get the damn thing finished! Bettina strode to her bedroom, right knee joint protesting, furiously pulled on gray sweats and shoved her feet into a pair of running shoes. She could barely contain her impatience to leave the house—well, really, 60 she needed to escape her office, the scene of procrastination and frustration—long enough to lace them up. Outside, the October day was glorious. The weather had finally broken through the grinding heat of a long summer. Her mind sang—there is a world out here, it’s big, it has real things in it!—as it relished liberation from the mounds of minutia to which it had been tethered all morning. Bettina waved to her husband, working in his greenhouse, as she left the yard. Not for the first time, she envied Marvin, who after twenty-five years in the botany department at Austin U., had started his own business, Marvin Gardens. She looked back to see his bulky body happily bent over his seedlings. Marvin, in his element helping his clients design their yards and gardens, now gladly cooked meals and kept their Hyde Park bungalow afloat; the whole house bloomed under his green thumb. Their son, Carl, finishing college as a landscape architect, planned to join his father in the business. There were occasional money worries given all of this entrepreneurial activity, of course, but in general Marvin had made an excellent move. Bettina, forty-nine and restless, contemplated her career options. On this fine day, her body slowly warming up as she walked briskly through her neighborhood toward the Hancock golf course, she couldn’t think of a single one but didn’t care as much as she had ten minutes before while chained to her desk. Girl, you’ve just got to get out more, she chided herself. Actually, she could think of several new occupations—landscape painting, consulting with older women on career changes, teaching yoga—but couldn’t imagine earning more than ten thousand dollars a year doing any one of them. Given the cost of living in Austin, Texas, where inexpensive living was a longgone relic of the seventies, it just wasn’t an option. At Twenty-ninth Street, under a half mile from her campus of- fice, she remembered some papers she needed to grade before the end of the week. Why not walk there instead of driving over later, she decided. She detoured east toward the red-roofed mini-city that was Austin University. 61 Choosing the stairs to the seventh floor over the recalcitrant elevator—keep those quads in shape, fifty is approaching, she coached herself—she arrived only mildly out of breath. Quiet greeted her: it was six p.m. on a Friday, the one day of the week when there were no late afternoon graduate seminars. She controlled the apprehension that had dogged her in the hallways since Isabel’s murder and strode to her office around the corner from the elevator. Catty-corner to her office was Miriam’s office, the door of which was open wide. “Miriam?” she called. How lucky to find her colleague in; she...