“I’m seeing Bernie the Sunday after next at their house-warming party. I suppose I know nothing of this, right?”
“Nothing is already too much. Don’t throw me under the bus now, okay? My tenure committee sits in two weeks’ time. I want that to go as smoothly as a lubed cock into—”
“Eeek! Yes, you’ve made your point, Blundell! I won’t say a dicky bird.”
On Tuesday morning I finally get a reply to my emailed apology to Vicky Benedetto and Pete Kirkpatrick, the organizers of the Notre Dame conference. Pete, who sends the reply, does not bother to pretend that they were not offended by my sneaking out of the conference like that. Nonetheless, they are offering to include me among the selected papers that they plan to publish as a collection of essays. I see this as a confirmation of my paper’s quality, but I also see how close I came to compromising myself professionally. It is like a near miss in the car—you’re grateful worse was prevented and resolve to keep your eyes very firmly on the road in future.
The light-blue lambswool sweater is a trusty friend, but I have not yet had the courage to wear my short tweed skirt, and at the beginning of the semester I would not even have considered combining it with what I consider to be among my coolest articles of clothing: a pair of brown nappa, knee-high, lace-up boots. My classes go like a dream. The remaining twenty-one students in the Comedy class eat out of the hollow of my hand, and Logan Williams—on time, for a change—sits in the last row and gazes at me with a mixture of resentment and fascination. Well, baby, I know that half of you—the lower half—wants to see me flat on my back across one of the classroom tables. But life’s a bitch and then you don’t fuck your professor.
Mental note: You do not fuck your professor.
On Wednesday afternoon Yvonne knocks on my office door.
“Anna. I need to tell you something. Do you have a minute?”
“Sure, come in.”
She closes the door behind herself very carefully and walks over to close the window. “I am violating someone’s confidence by telling you this, so please promise me that you won’t do the same? I know that sounds idiotic, but I simply have to talk to someone about it!”
“Is this about Hornbergergate? Actually, Tim calls it ‘Hornygate,’ but you know Tim.”
“When is his tenure review?” Yvonne frowns. “It’s not for me to say, but isn’t he very careless with the things he says in public?”
“Look, the boy’s under a lot of pressure in that damned hearing panel—cut him some slack. Anyway—”
“Yes, anyway.” She inhales deeply and holds her breath for a moment. “There’s this woman in the church I joined last year. She’s divorced, too, lives with her younger daughter not far from me; the daughter sometimes sits with Teddy and Ally in the evenings. Last Sunday—and remember the story about Hornberger was in the Shaftsboro Times on Saturday!—we had a clothes bazaar, and she and I happened to have kitchen duty at the same time. I saw at once that something was bothering her, and eventually I asked, and she—God, I find this so upsetting! She told me that she knew someone who was a student at Ardrossan in the seventies and that this woman was raped by Hornberger!”
“A ghost from the past! You wonder how many there are. Will this woman come forward?”
“No, no, you haven’t heard it all.” Yvonne catches my hands in hers. “Anna, I do believe she was talking about herself! I know her as Louise Randall—Louise may easily have been Mary-Lou as a girl! I know that her mother was white, and she is clearly an intelligent, educated woman, and she told me once that her first husband was the manager of the store where she worked. That all fits, doesn’t it?”
The skin on my arms puckers with goose bumps.
“Could it be a coincidence?”
“Yeah, because there were hundreds of women of color at private universities in the mid-seventies!”
“You’re right,” I agree. “Not a coincidence. Dear God—what now?”
“I was hoping you’d help me figure that out.”
“How did she seem to feel about the whole thing? The fact that she told you seems to indicate that she needed to talk about it, even if it was under cover of that old chestnut, ‘I have this friend who—’”
“I could repeat Elaine Shaw’s account to her and see how she