Death of a Department Chair: A Novel

Editor’s Note

3 Editor’s Note When my friends first asked me to chronicle the misfortunes of last autumn, I refused. For who wishes to revisit the end of her world? The moment when the tenor of life forever changes its pitch is not one to sing about. But I found I could not forget, either— those events still haunt me, still hover in the atmosphere as the last breath of winter lingers in the March air. In time, the need to speak up won out. My tenure at Austin University, a public school of extravagant ambition, had seemed secure. When I stumbled over the odd snag in my route—as we all do from time to time—I trusted the path would endure even if my own step upon it might not. But in the silencing of one human heart, all broke apart—the road ahead, my reputation , the stability of institutional life itself. On a sunny, unremarkable Monday morning last October, Isabel Vittorio, chair of my department, a woman gifted with focus, intelligence—and, some said, an outsized sense of self-worth—was found slumped over her desk in her office on the seventh floor of 4 Helmsley Hall. Her face was swollen, her neck bruised, and her collarbone broken. Certainly she was dead, and had been for some time—perhaps for as long as two days, since she was discovered on a Monday. Her murder—for all signs pointed to that fact—seemed shocking even though we live in a country, and a state, noted for violence . After all, this is a college campus, where the tiniest happenings are scrutinized, measured, and catalogued with paranoic zeal. In such a place, a misplaced poster can assume the magnitude of a public indiscretion. Therefore, the sight of a slain middle-aged professor with her clothes ripped from her less-than-perfect body is shocking indeed. The puzzling detail of her state of undress derailed the investigation for some time, leading the police to ferret out the victim’s sexual history to the exclusion of other pertinent clues. Again, this is a college campus. If one chooses to focus on the sexual, the odor of indiscretion and intrigue pervades one’s every breath. Have you ever witnessed a Texas gulley-washer? No? Well, trust me when I say that a dry creek bed can transform in seconds into a torrent barreling down on the unwary with the force of a derailed locomotive. A similar power is unleashed when someone whispers “sex” in the hallowed halls of academe. How do I know that the police were misled in their search for the perpetrator of the crime? That they were as bewildered by the false scents of scandal as a birddog snuffling through a warehouse of feather beds? I know because I, Miriam Held, a faculty member in the Department of Literature and Rhetoric at Austin University, was with Isabel Vittorio in the last hour of her life. Unfortunately, I had also had a romantic liaison with the victim twelve years before. Worse, one of my oldest friends was being held political hostage by Isabel right before the murder. As if all of this were not damning enough, only six months earlier Isabel had prevailed against me in a bitter battle for the chairmanship of our department. I was perceived , to quote the inelegant language of one of my colleagues, to be “picking at my scabs and biding my time” until I could retaliate . And so, not just one motive appeared to implicate me in 5 Isabel’s demise, but several. I feared for a time that even my life partner , Vivian Garnet, and my dearest friends sometimes doubted my innocence. I don’t want to mislead anyone: naturally my tenure at this tolerable (though not always tolerant) institution has been marked—a resolute course is not always a smooth one. The star of my career has flared and faded in reaction to the priorities and fashions of campus politics. Just as public interest lurches capriciously from one headline to the next, the judgment of one’s colleagues seems arbitrary. Only the punctuation that accompanies these shifts—cries of despair one moment, rants of joy at another—is predictable. I am a person of quiet habits, a woman with an intellectual bent who thrills to the chase of an errant reference much as the avid mountain climber eyes the north...