Death of a Department Chair: A Novel

3

25 3 The story of each life begs to be told. Not by one person, but by many. If we don’t tell our stories, if others don’t talk about us, can we even claim to have existed? Life as theatre isn’t just a metaphor: the stage can be seen as the playing field of a life, a life as a complex system of interlocking stages. Go ahead, tread those boards, strut your stuff, write your own script. Dennis Reagan, introductory course in playwriting Fiona left Bettina in the coffee shop and made her way to her ten a.m. class in a confounded state. She planned to spend the time providing a forum for those who needed to discuss the tragedy. Yet her steps dragged as she neared Helmsley Hall; after what had happened , she felt an aversion to the building itself. Isabel, dead. No, Isabel , murdered. The word alone had the power to alter the shape of the universe. Isabel, a senior professor with an international reputation , a woman who’d come to Austin U. celebrated and empowered the year after Fiona had received tenure, had seemed invincible. Arrested by her thoughts, Fiona stopped on the sidewalk in front of the building in the shade of a red oak—the October sun still hinted of an incandescent summer—and tugged at a long silver earring. Isabel had been a study in paradoxes: invincible but unlikable, daunting but heartless, esteemed but not trustworthy. She remembered only too well Isabel’s interview in the Department of Literature and Rhetoric. At the time, Fiona had been the youngest of three tenured women in the department, something she had not found terribly significant before. But sitting in the 26 conference room that day, watching Isabel, sharp-eyed and sharptongued , as she worked the room during her job talk, Fiona couldn’t help noticing that Isabel never allowed her gaze to rest on her. She looked at Bettina and Miriam, and at other faculty members— Sigmund Froelich, the chair at that time; Richard Lester, a noted Americanist; even assistant professors like Craig Burnett and Carlos Lambros, young men who had virtually no standing at all—but not at her. Fiona found Isabel’s imperious manner off-putting and her research only marginally interesting. But Isabel had been hired, had in a sense been pushed down the throats of the faculty by the dean at the time, who found Isabel’s international reputation and tough-minded style irresistible. The rumor was that Isabel was the dean’s pick to be chair after Sigmund stepped down. What had remained most vivid in Fiona’s memory was that after Isabel’s hire (the candidate had returned for two more interviews and continued to ignore Fiona), she had been grading in her office when Isabel, without knocking, slid inside the room in a reptilian way and coiled her long legs in the chair across from Fiona’s desk. “Fiona!” she had said, a hearty gleam in her eye. “Yes?” Fiona remembered holding her pen in the air, poised, her only protection from this intruder perhaps? “You know, we must have lunch.” Fiona noticed that this was not an invitation or a request, but a proclamation. Startled and annoyed by the sudden promotion from pariah to lunch partner in Isabel’s regard, Fiona said nothing. Isabel had the grace to cough. “Well, when I was here before, I thought you were an assistant professor.” Fiona waited for a further explanation; what was the woman’s point? “No, I was tenured last year.” “Exactly! I found out that you have tenure, that you are . . .” She paused and arched an eyebrow. Isabel’s thin, sharp features gave her a judgmental air. The hawklike eyes surveyed Fiona impatiently. Fiona imagined that Isabel’s students dreaded that look, the accusatory “surely you understand” look that labeled the merest hesitation 27 as stupidity. Fiona finally got it: Isabel’s ellipsis after “you are . . .” could be filled in with “. . . a permanent member of the faculty,” a.k.a., “a real person.” Had Fiona not had tenure, Isabel could have devoted her energies to getting rid of her if she wished, or simply disregarded her as impermanent and inconsequential, ergo not worth bothering with. A disconcerting wave of shame coursed through Fiona. Anger constricted her throat. She wanted to tell the woman to leave, to take her careerist self...