to get her to go back to her discussion of the site and the goodies, but imagined it would throw her off balance even more, and then she’d be explaining about how the Europeans had actually started regularly visiting this side of the ocean in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but that the Indians had been here a good long stretch before that.
Her extemporaneous ramblings seemed to peter out and she faltered, looking around the darkened room nervously. She caught my eye and I just about strained something, simultaneously trying to look reassuring, urge her on, and indicate that she should get back to the substance of her paper. She nodded, found her place, and began to read again, moving through the text smoothly, once in a while looking out to the audience, and pausing occasionally to point out something in one of her slides. She didn’t go too fast, she read the paper as if she was familiar with its contents, and she remembered to breathe normally. I began to relax as she did, and found myself nodding as she hit the right beats about the pottery and the military artifacts. When she showed the slide of the tiny early pipe-bowl fragment, which was our present pride and joy, unearthed during the last field season, there was an appreciative murmur through the crowd that made her flush with pride.
At last she finished, just a minute ahead of schedule.
“Thanks, Katie, well done,” I said.
Katie’d done a good job overall, but she again looked like a deer in the headlights. For an instant, I thought she was going to stay frozen up there as the polite clapping for her petered out; I moved to announce the final speaker, thinking I would have to nudge her back to her seat, when a louder ovation, more raucous than the rest of the audience, came from the back of the room. I peered through the lights and saw a cadre of graduate students, led by Meg Garrity, standing at the back, clapping and shouting for Katie. She flushed and smiled, collected up her paper and her water, and ducked her head, giving them an embarrassed little hand flick as she found her way back to her seat.
“Our last speaker, Michelle Lima, will be presenting her paper entitled ‘English and Dutch Pipes in the Mid-Atlantic Colonies Before Seventeen Fifty.’ Michelle?”
Michelle was right on cue, coming up the stairs as I was going down. I stopped to let her pass, and she leaned over to speak in my ear.
“You going to be at the Grope later, honeycakes?” she whispered.
“But of course, my darling Misha-lima. Wouldn’t miss it for the world.”
“And it wouldn’t be a party without you.” She got to the lectern and in a much different, fully professional voice, said, “Thank you, Emma,” and began her paper.
After the questions at the end of the session, I found Katie out in the hallway, and congratulated her, moving her out of the crowd intent on finding their ways to the next papers. “That was great! And look, you were able to walk away! Very far from what you were predicting back on campus.”
She twisted her presentation pages into a tube. “I got nervous. Could you tell? I just lost my place for a minute, and then I started thinking about who was out there, listening to me, and I just started babbling. I looked like an idiot.”
“Naw. I think people knew that you were a little nervous, but that’s okay, and you recovered really well, and that’s the name of the game, right? And then you finished up like a pro, so that was more than ninety percent that went smoother than silk.”
“Yeah, I guess so.” She stuck the tube between her knees, trying to recapture the escaping scrunchie. “I was kinda disappointed that Professor Garrison didn’t show up. I really wanted to meet him, today. I mean, especially since I got into his session rather than the general one on pipe studies.”
I thought, please don’t ask me to introduce you later, please don’t ask me to introduce you later, please don’t ask me—
Katie hesitated, then looked up. “If we see him later, would you introduce me to him? I’d really like that, because I wanted to ask him about some of the stuff in his book on West Devon factories.”
I really wanted to tell her, but I also wanted to respect Scott’s wishes about how he announced the news of Garrison’s death. “Look, he’s kind of