the good news. “But she’s only thirty-five; she can try a little longer.” I have the uncanny feeling that she is giving me a sound bite from home.
There is a lot of bitterness here, and again I wonder whether it wouldn’t improve Jules’ lot if there was a little tomato princeling to shoulder his elders’ expectations. But it wouldn’t be appropriate to share this with her, particularly since there may well not be a princeling. Instead, I give her what I hope is an encouraging smile and let her jump first across the brook and onto the grass verge of the dirt track leading past the farm. In a cloud of dust a car approaches, a pick-up about ten years more beat-up than Pop Walsh’s. Jules seems to recognize it; she gives a little yelp and starts waving. The pick-up slows down, and out the window leans my favorite student.
“Hey, ladies—going home already? The party’s just starting!”
Jules giggles and says something about a curfew. I wonder whether her admiration is as obvious to him as it is to me, and my heart sinks.
“Who’s your friend?” Logan asks Jules and hesitates only for the tiniest moment before he looks over at me, bold as brass. Looks me straight in the eye, daring me.
“Oh, this is Anna!” Jules responds eagerly. “Lieberman, Dr. Lieberman. She is an English professor at the Folly, too—don’t you know each other?”
“Yeah, the name rings a bell.”
Against my will I am a little tickled by this display of chuzpah, but if he thinks he can play me, he better think again.
“Logan is in one of my classes this semester, Jules.”
“He is? That’s so neat!” she exclaims. “That’s so weird, though! Don’t you think that’s weird?”
“I do.” My tone is dry enough to register with Logan, but not with Jules, whose attention is focused on the boy.
“Stranger things happen at sea,” he says breezily and drives off.
Great. Logan Williams and Jules Walsh exchanging gossip about his new professor and her family’s new tenant. This you do not get if you teach on a large urban campus.
“How come Logan hangs out with the pickers?”
“He has a job here! He’s a regular, been picking for, dunno, four or five years?”
With a dysfunctional family and the transition from a community college to Ardrossan University to digest, Calderbrook farm may well be a comforting factor of continuity in Logan’s life. He’s welcome to it, too, as long as he keeps his mitts off my landlord’s underage step-granddaughter.
Chapter 15
KAY CHANG WAS RIGHT to suspect that the students know far more about the affaire Hornberger than we do after the evasive briefing by our Dean and our new chair. There appears to be no other topic these days on the fourth floor of the Observatory than Greco vs. Hornberger, and the hub for all information is Natalie’s and Selena’s office. Natalie keeps coming to school with an air of wounded but stubborn pride that I secretly admire—no matter whether it is real or a show.
Unfortunately, as a junior professor I must not be seen to allow or encourage familiarity with students. All I can say after a few days of walking purposefully (and noisily! In-yer-face!) past their open door on my way toward the stairs is that there is word of at least half a dozen other students who have, over the years, enjoyed Hornberger’s attentions, that he got a kick out of seducing them in all sorts of places on campus including his office, the library, and the elevator at Rossan House (this I assign to the realm of the fantastic), and that nobody seems to be openly contesting Natalie’s version of events.
They—she and Nick—went to a conference together in Los Angeles shortly before the semester started; he lured her into his room, plied her with drink, and forced himself on her. This is more or less the story that I expected, and I’m ashamed to say that my first thought is that Natalie will find it difficult to explain away her friendliness toward Hornberger since then. It is easy to imagine how the same events are being related by Hornberger himself, probably with as much claim to subjective truth. This affair will occupy our thoughts and time for months to come, money and administrative resources will be wasted, and in the end nothing will emerge but the two irreconcilable narratives that we already know today. Just because an aging male professor can’t resist the opportunities that offer themselves to him in the nubile