The Communion of the Saint - Chapter 1

It seemed presumptuous to presuppose that anyone would want to pay to read a book without some idea of whether the author could write his way out of a paper bag. Therefore, here is Chapter 1 of my sort-of-historical-sort-of-mystical novel, The Communion of the Saint, which can be listened to (free) on podiobooks.com, read for $19.95 in a DTB, or downloaded (cheap) to read on a Kindle ($0.99).

Chapter 1

     

I have to admit: I was not at my best.

      After the discount airline lost my luggage; after British immigration decided that, without my bags, I looked like a potential terrorist; after being groped by an officious matron who enjoyed her job far too much, and sniffed by a drooling German shepherd (ditto); after recovering my bags from a later flight with only a snarl from a pasty-faced skinhead to show for it; after taking the wrong train from among the dozens on offer at Kings Cross because I was too stubborn to ask for help; and long, long after dark, I finally staggered into the hotel in Saint Albans, only to be told that the hotel was full and my reservation void.

      “You seem to be without the proper form, Ms. Griffin.” The pale, balding clerk leafed through a sheaf of papers. “We require a deposit to hold your reservation beyond six o’clock. It should have been noted on the form, but there is no form. Evidently a mistake has been made.”

      A line of even later arrivals stretched behind me.

      Jeans wrinkled from hours of transatlantic inactivity, blouse spattered from a confrontation between airline coffee and “mild” turbulence, and feeling as crumpled inside as out, I asked, if royalty appeared, whether the management could find room for them. I had always wanted to try that line.

      “Why yes, madam. Of course.” The clerk’s expression told me what he thought of American manners—mine in particular.

      “Then give me their room,” I demanded, a tired, hungry, thoroughly frazzled American bereft of manners of any kind. “They’re not coming.”

      He gave me a thin, mocking smile. His eyes filled with satisfaction.

      “Actually, they’re here. That’s why we’re full up, you see. If you had only rung us up, we could have held your room, but as it is—”

      “Can you recommend another place?” I interrupted.

      My irritation must have shown, for the clerk looked past me to the growing line of people, all pale and European, all of whom I was holding up. “Perhaps a B-and-B. That would be a bed-and-breakfast.”

      It was hard to stomp out of the carpeted lobby while wearing tennis shoes, but I tried. The best I managed was a farewell squeak where the carpet ended and tile began at the entrance.

      I dragged my luggage along the empty street. The tourist board at the town center was closed for the night. I slumped against a trash can by the door, wondering what to do. I hadn’t intended to be difficult in the hotel; it just came naturally.

      A breeze blew up out of nowhere, strong and strange; the night was clear, the air dry, with no hint of weather. A scrap of paper detached itself from the kiosk in front of the tourist board, not ten feet away from where I stood. The paper whirled in the wind, yet the dirt on the street below it lay undisturbed.

      The scrap of white spun through the night air and grazed my face. I brushed at it and let it fly off on the wind. It circled me, twice, within arms’ reach. I shooed it away, as if it were a moth. It fluttered off, circled, then dived at me like a kamikaze. I batted it out of the air and stuffed it into the trash can.

      The wind sighed and paused, gathering itself, then lifted the paper out of the dustbin—only that single white sheet. I grabbed, but a gust took it just out of reach. The paper hung in the air, trembling.

      Read it. The voice came from behind, in my right ear.

      I whirled, awkward and off balance with all the bags hanging from me, to see who had spoken, but I was still alone.

      It wasn’t a voice, I realized. I was tired, angry, frustrated, jet-lagged. My subconscious had noticed the sign and my conscious mind just hadn’t registered it yet. The rest was just coincidence.

      The wind fell silent. The paper drifted to the concrete, face up.

      Pick it up. Read it.

      I don’t talk to myself—well, not much—and when I do, I sound like me, not like whatever it was I heard. My heart thudded against my ribcage. I spun full circle. Luggage centrifuged out from me.

      No one was there. I didn’t know whether to be relieved that no one had seen my panic or scared by the sound of the voice.

      I picked up the sheet.

      At the top, large hand-drawn letters proclaimed “B & B” in black magic marker. A fringe of inch-long tabs, each marked with a precise, hand-printed telephone number, marched across the bottom. None had been torn off, which meant that—I peered at the flyer in the evening dark—Mrs. Fern was likely to have room.

     

      A proposition: God’s not there. Everything is accident, happenstance. How you can live your life without hope is beyond me.

     

      Mrs. Fern’s bed and breakfast faced the abbey gate house on Romeland Hill. I neared the old Gothic buildings, not afraid, exactly, but cautious. I had studied the abbey and town from afar. I felt like a private eye who’d gotten too close to someone she was shadowing, in over my head before I’d even begun.

      Mrs. Fern’s was one in a row of nineteenth-century red brick houses that lined the lane. The abbey loomed, a great gray shadow on my left. Only the church itself and the two-storied gate house still stood. The rest had vanished with the zeal and the greed of the Protestant reformers during the sixteenth century.

      This one. The voice again.

      “Nothing’s happening.” I spoke aloud. “It’s fatigue, stress.” The dark sidewalk was empty. There was no one to hear me. This whole voice business was just some intuition, welling up from my unconscious because I was too frazzled to censor it.

      The paper flew out of my grasp and stuck to the door of the house where, it seemed, I was to go. An enormous mulberry bush hid the house number. I hauled my bags up the short flight of steps and rang the bell.

      “Can I help you, dear?” A woman in late middle age held the door open a scant inch.

      I held out the flyer. “Do you have a room to rent?”

      “You were only to tear off one of the tabs, not take the whole thing.”

      “I’m sorry.” I forced the apology. Hearing voices makes me nervous. When I’m scared, I get sarcastic. It was long after dark; I had little patience left. “The wind blew it in my face.”

      “Did it, now?”

      “Do you have a room?”

      “They told me, at the tourist board, that no one would see it where I put it up, you know, but it was the only place left. You’re quite the lucky one. Come in.”

      I hoisted my bags over the threshold and into the foyer.

      “Do you have any references?” Her voice sweetened, but I heard a hint of iron, too.

      “I didn’t think I’d need—”

      “You can’t expect me to take a stranger into my home without references. Not in this day and age.” She folded her arms. The lamp in the sitting room behind gave her frizzy gray hair a golden halo; shadow hid her face.

      I delved into my purse for a letter of introduction from  Father Harry—his Towhomit. He had given it to me only two days before. It seemed longer.

      “I’m worried about you, Clio.” He had taken me unawares.

      It was a week after my father’s funeral. Father Harry was an old friend of Papa’s. He had baptized me, thirty-odd years before, and I think he felt that, since all my family was gone now, he owed it to Papa to look out for me.

      “I’m all right. It’s been a rough couple of weeks,” I told him.

      I wasn’t all right, but at least I had something to do. The ticket to England was safe in my jacket pocket. I had carried it with me since it arrived, pre-paid, from the travel agency.

      We were at the grave that held both my parents. Mama had died the year before, and we all breathed a sigh of relief that it had not been by her own hand even as we grieved her going. Papa held on, as long as he could, longer than he had wanted to.

      A pelting June rain had pounded the raw dirt of Papa’s grave. The mound was lower than it had been. Soon, grass would grow green and strong with the spring.

      The wind whistled, preternaturally cold for June in Philadelphia. Father Harry kept a watch out for me from his office in the old rectory of St. Stephen’s. He had served here until his retirement, and a grateful congregation had given the aging widower the use of the old rectory for the rest of his life. He helped out occasionally with the odd service, and the new priest much preferred his own condo in a nicer neighborhood.

      Father Harry’s window looked out over the old church’s graveyard. Papa was the last one who would be buried there. He filled it up, and the church had to give in and close it to new interments. The plot was surrounded by city, and there was no room left. I pulled my jacket tight.

      Father Harry watched for me because every day I’d been coming out to talk to Papa. He—Father Harry—had seen me one morning, and after Mama’s illness and Papa’s death, he took over worrying about me.

      “I’m all right,” I repeated. Somehow, I had to tell him I was leaving. The house was in the hands of another of Papa’s old friends, a lawyer-cum-realtor who would sell it and send me the proceeds. He was handling Papa’s estate, too.

      “I got this, a few days ago.”

      “What?”

      I handed him the much-read letter. It was my notification that my teaching contract would not be renewed, the second blow of the week.

      Father Harry read through it slowly. He squinted in the sunlight. The paper fluttered in the wind.

      “I can’t say much for their timing.” He handed me the letter. “What will you do?”

      I refolded it and stuck it back in the envelope. The creases were beginning to show dirt from too much handling.

      “If I want, I can stay through another year. It’s kind of a warning—they give you a year to find another job.”

      “That’s something, then.” He squinted at me again. The clouds reflected from his spectacles. “You’re thinking of not staying?”

      “There’s a job, in England, that I might get. It starts right away. And I don’t want to stay at the college if they don’t want me.”

      Father Harry strolled, and I followed. I knew he wanted to get me away from the graves.

      “The teaching—it went badly, then?”

      I shook my head. “The teaching went fine. It was the publishing. I could never get the knack of writing what everyone thought I should.”

      We reached a bench, in the lee of the stone wall. A miniature bronze St. Francis waved to animals that only he could see.

      Father Harry sat. The cold gave his coffee-colored skin a bluish tinge. I sat on his windward side to shield him from the worst of the wind. I liked him, because Papa liked him, and because he had been kind me. I couldn’t manage to believe what he wanted me to, but he was all right. He had paid attention to me as a little girl, and helped when the neighbor kids, both white and black, teased me for not being one way or the other. Red hair and cafe-au-lait skin made an odd combination. They teased me a lot.

      “I don’t suppose I can get you back into church, then.” He brushed at an imaginary wisp of hair. Father Harry’s scalp was as smooth as the stones in the floor of his early nineteenth century inner city church.

      “Maybe later.” The ache of Papa’s absence, never itself absent, swelled until I thought I would choke. I sat by Father Harry, and he put his skinny arm around my shoulders.

      It was years since I cried. I hadn’t cried for Mama. I hadn’t cried when my boyfriend dumped me, months before, complaining that I was too “intense.” I hadn’t cried for Papa. I sat through his funeral, my teeth clamped together like the steel jaws of a vise, the last of my family, alone in the front pew. I hadn’t cried when I got the letter that told me I wasn’t needed any longer at Schuylkill College.

      So I needed to cry, and Father Harry held me while I did it.

      “He’s really gone,” I sniffed.

      “Yes, Clio, he is. I miss him.”

      “Me, too.” I straightened. Father Harry’s eyes were wet, but he handed me his handkerchief. I dabbed and handed it back. “I don’t want to stay. Even if this job doesn’t work out, at least it’ll be a vacation, a change of scene. I don’t want to live in that house any more. It’s too empty. I always expect to see one of them when I go through a doorway, but they’re not there.”

      The tears came again, gentler this time, like rain after the thunder has passed. Father Harry patted my hand. I wouldn’t have taken it from anybody else; no one else had the right.

      “When do you go?”

      “Tonight. This was to tell Papa good-bye.” I pushed one  of his imaginary wisps of hair back into place. “And you.”

      “I’ll miss you, Clio. God go with you.” He raised his hand in blessing, and, like the moment earlier when he patted my hand, I allowed it, even though I didn’t think it would do me any good. Sometimes it’s just the thought that counts, and he was doing what he believed in. I wished I did.

      We sat still for a moment, at loose ends, not quite knowing what to do, before he rose.

      “Where in England is this job?”

      “Saint Albans. Outside London.”

      “You’ll want to tell your father, then.” His voice was gentle. He smiled, as if he had a secret, then tottered off.

      I returned to the grave.

      Every day for a week I’d come here. Every day for a week he’d stayed dead, silent, so I talked to him, but only when we were alone.

      In a way, I was glad he didn’t answer. As long as the dead stay silent, we’re safe. The divide is not bridged.

      The earth on his grave was raw, moist with the rains of late spring, dark and muddy. Wind tore at the dying storm and opened a rift in the heavens. My corner of the cemetery glowed for a long moment, before the gray clouds again roofed the world.

      Go.

      It was only one word. The sound, if it was a sound, must have welled up from my subconscious. I replayed it in my head—Go. It was all right to leave him now.

      I stood at the foot of his grave and missed him. Part of me wondered what he was doing now. Part of me insisted he was lying in a box under hundreds of pounds of dirt.

      After a while, I couldn’t take it any more. I wrapped my jacket tight and walked toward the gate.

      Father Harry met me by the rectory.

      “I know we already said our good-byes, Clio, but I wanted you to have this.” He held out a white envelope. “It’s a Towhomit.”

      “A what?” Towhomit sounded like a birdcall.

      Father Harry smiled. “My little joke. It’s a letter of reference, which begins ‘To Whom It May Concern.’ You might find it useful. I’ve been to Saint Albans, although it’s been some years. The letter merely asks that the reader give you any assistance he might.”

      I accepted the envelope and hugged Father Harry. He was all bones, as fragile as china. “Thank you.”

      “Go with God, child.”

      I nodded, unable to speak. It was part emotion—I might never see him again—and part unwillingness to argue the point. It was no time for theology. Instead, I got into my car and drove away. Father Harry stood at the graveyard’s gate and waved good-bye.

      I held out his Towhomit to Mrs. Fern.

      She studied the letter until, satisfied with my respectability, she handed it back.

      “I suppose you’re safe enough. At least you have enough baggage you won’t be sneaking out.” She told me the rate. It was two orders of magnitude cheaper than the hotel. “That includes breakfast. Other meals are extra.”

      Mrs. Fern pointed at the thinnest bag where I kept my laptop. “Is that a computer?”

      “Um, yes, it is,” I stammered.

      “The power is a little iffy. Do you have an adapter?”

      She was more savvy to high tech than I expected. I nodded.

      “Come ahead, then. You’ll want to see the room, I expect.”

      She led me into the parlor.

      “No telly. I don’t hold with it.”

      I explained that I didn’t plan to spend my time in front of the idiot box, then we were on the narrow stair that led to the second floor, except that she called it the first. England seems like the States on the surface, but it’s not.

      She led me through a wide hall, lit only by a single sconce. Mrs. Fern’s sensible shoes clacked on the polished wood.

      “I’m very particular,” she told me, “about neatness. How long will you stay?”

      Then we were in the spare room. A narrow bed ran along the right-hand wall, covered with a flowered spread. A small student desk lay opposite the door, next to a dresser, both of antique pine. The room’s single window penetrated the roof through a gable; its curtains matched the bed spread. A braided oval rug lay on the floor by the bed.

      “The dresser was the one my Henry first bought when we were married. It’s old, but it’s still serviceable.”

      I opened a drawer. The scent of cedar filled the tiny room.

      “The lav is down the hall. I take my bath in the evening, just before bed, so I’ll thank you to use it another time, and clean the tub when you’re finished. There’s a cloth for the purpose in the bath closet. Breakfast is at half seven. Will you take it?”

      I caught on to her abrupt shifts of subject. For the second time she had asked if I wanted the room.

      “Yes.”

      “How long?”

      “I don’t know how long I’ll be here. A week?”

      “Not big on plans, are you? I imagine I can stand anyone for a week. Payment in advance.” She named a figure. I counted out the oversized bills. Another difference.

      “Let’s get your bags. You certainly brought enough.” She led me back through the hall and down the stairs. “I like my privacy, I’ll warn you. Some think I’m a little dotty, but I’ll leave you alone, and thank you to do the same unless invited. What brings you to Saint Albans? I wouldn’t think an American tourist would find enough to do to spend a week here.”

      I grabbed the computer first.

      “A writer, are you?” Mrs. Fern took two suitcases by herself. I picked up the third. We staggered back upstairs. “My Henry hated to read, but I love it.”

      The assault of conversation finally ceased after we deposited the bags in my room. Mrs. Fern’s retreating footsteps echoed down the hall. I dropped on the bed.

     

      A counter-proposition: God is there; the universe has purpose and direction. How you can live your life without being terrified of judgment is beyond me.

     

      When I awoke, it was still dark outside. Light glared from the ceiling. My watch showed two-fifteen. I walked softly down the hall to the bathroom. When I pulled the chain that flushed the overhead tank, water thumped through the pipes and gurgled down the bowl. I cringed at the racket and readied my apology, but Mrs. Fern did not appear.

      I relish the stealthy hours when all around me sleep. Secrets pile up in the day. At night, I take them out of hiding, turn them over, get to know them.

      This voice in my ear had me worried—afraid, if truth be told—but if nothing more happened, I could repress the whole business. I would have to make sure, though, to get enough rest, eat properly, and exercise.

      I worried because Mama had heard voices, and I was always scared that what she had was hereditary. It’s one thing to be eccentric; I can’t help that I see the world from off-center. It’s quite another to have to be locked up and physically restrained so that you don’t obey the voices in your head.

      Mama knew she was crazy, at least part of the time. I saw in her eyes the desperation, the fear. She let herself into the hospital, to protect me and Papa, but nothing we or the doctors or the nurses could do helped. Drugs that didn’t sedate her made her manic.

      This train of thought wasn’t going anywhere. I wanted to relax, not get myself all wired up. Doing something was better than lying there obsessing; I unpacked, with exaggerated care, so as not to disturb my hostess. The computer was first.

      I found my music next. Headphones on, I listened to the serene voices of chanting Benedictine monks. Their measured voices, rising and falling in ancient unison, calmed me better than Mama’s medications had ever done for her. My clothes went into the old dresser.

      The room still looked untenanted. I stuffed my bags inside each other and hid them in the closet. My watch showed three—too early to do anything, but I knew that sleep wouldn’t come now. With medieval plainsong ringing in my ears—I always keep the volume too loud—I found myself with nothing to do but listen.

      At first, the voice was one among the many chanting in my ears.

      “No,” I pleaded, “go away.”

      I shook my head. The headphones dropped to encircle my neck, their touch a tickling hand around my throat. Tinny voices still droned, but far away—except for one.

      I switched off the CD player. Still, the voice spoke softly, a resonant whisper at the edge of hearing.

      I threw the headset across the room. The portable CD player clattered to the wooden floor.

      Muffled footsteps approached. A rapid series of knocks shattered the momentary silence.

      “Are you all right?”

      My heart was pounding, my breathing ragged. I couldn’t let my landlady see me like this. I took a few seconds to gain control, then opened the door. Mrs. Fern, in her dressing gown, her hair in blue plastic rollers, cocked her fist to knock again.

      “Are you all right?” A frown creased her forehead.

      “I’m sorry. I dropped something.” That was true, if incomplete. “I couldn’t sleep.”

      “It’s the time change, I expect—jet lag.” Mrs. Fern’s expression relaxed. “Come downstairs. I’ll make us a cup of tea. I don’t sleep as much as I used to, anyway.”

      “I don’t want to be any trouble.” But she had already started down. I followed. At that point, I didn’t want to be alone.

      “It’s no trouble. I get up in the night. It’s so quiet and peaceful—like stolen time.” Mrs. Fern busied herself at the sink and stove while I sat at the kitchen table. She stared out the window, blessedly silent, while we waited for the water to boil and steep.

      Mrs. Fern snapped her fingers. The noise jarred me out of my funk. “Gracious, you’re still dressed. Don’t you have a dressing gown?”

      She left me alone and dashed up the stairs. I followed her progress overhead.

      The voice sounded again, in recognizable English, just below the threshold of understanding. Male.

      “No,” I whispered, pleading. “Leave me alone.”

      To keep from listening, I examined the kitchen. The fixtures—stove, refrigerator, sink, cabinets—were relics of the nineteen-forties. Everything was white and silver, tinted by the yellow glow of the ceiling light. The floor was a black and white chess board. The table was all chrome and marbled formica. I sat at one of four metal chairs with cushions of gray vinyl. The window hulked over the kitchen sink, a black hole looking out on the deeper black of a back yard, flanked by red and white checkered curtains.

      Footsteps thudded again overhead, then down the stairs. No one could call my hostess dainty.

      “Here—try this on.” Mrs. Fern held a white terry housecoat.

      “I couldn’t—”

      “I bought it for my guests to use. You’re the first.”

      I stood and let her wrap me in the thick robe. The soft weight slid deliciously around my shoulders and I pulled it close.

      “I should have gotten it out right away,” Mrs. Fern said. “I just didn’t expect anyone so soon. They’re such a bother to pack—so bulky. When I decided I had to let the room, I thought about the problems of traveling and the robe was one of the first things I bought. Tea?”

      I held out my cup.

      I always suspect compassion. As Mrs. Fern filled the cup, I looked into her face. Her hazel eyes, flecked with bits of brown and green, watched my cup. Steam and the moist scent of tea rose between us. Her skin was that milky color I would have killed for as a child, before I knew I could never have it. Age lines showed around her mouth and eyes, and her chin had a smaller, looser neighbor underneath.

      Her eyes met mine. I shifted my gaze, caught watching in an unprotected moment.

      “Your hand is trembling, dear.”

      I set my cup down, harder than I intended. Tea sloshed onto the table.

      “I’m sorry—you’ve been so kind, and—” Before I could finish my apology, Mrs. Fern had mopped up the mess and refilled my cup.

      “It’s quite all right. No harm done.” In spite of her disclaimer, her brows wrinkled. I lifted the cup with both hands and let the steaming tea fill my nostrils; it smelled of distant sunshine. I sipped, carefully.

      “Have you met the ghost yet?”

      I spluttered. Tea sprayed in all directions.

      Mrs. Fern handed me the tea towel after using it on herself. “I see you have.”

      This time I mopped up after myself.

      “He doesn’t usually manifest to strangers. You’re quite fortunate, actually. And don’t worry,” she added, anticipating me, “he’s quite harmless. It’s just that here, next to the abbey, he seems to be especially present. I think he’s beneficent, actually. He’s certainly never harmed me.” I couldn’t think of an answer. Mrs. Fern changed the subject. Again. “What kinds of things do you write?”

      “History,” I managed. “I’m an assistant professor of history.” Or was, I added mentally.

      “Oh, splendid!”

      Her enthusiasm, so soon after her revelation about the ghost, disconcerted me, if I had ever been concerted, since getting here. Nothing was the way I had planned it.

      “Does he talk to you?”

      I couldn’t answer. Maybe my silence was confirmation enough, but I was not about to trade paranormal experiences, or whatever I was suffering from, with an old woman I’d just met, no matter how kind she was.

      Mrs. Fern took the cups to the sink. I followed with the silver and the wet towel. Side by side, we stood motionless before the dark window.

      “Clio—may I call you Clio?—you seem quite at sixes and sevens. Surely it can’t all be jet lag.”

      I twisted the tap. Water splashed noisily into the sink. I hadn’t planned on explaining anything to anyone, especially a woman I had just met.

      My hands seemed to move of their own accord. I washed, Mrs. Fern dried. I didn’t want her to think me crazy; I did quite enough of that on my own.

      “Just too many things have happened lately,” I answered. But she deserved some sort of explanation; she’d taken me into her house and now probably wondered whether she’d been foolish to do so.

      I explained about Daddy’s death, holding to the barest detail.

      The soap made the tea things slippery. I washed her cups and silver carefully, aware of her attention.

      Washing dishes can be a road to contemplation. My job had faded away in a denial of tenure. The small college where I had taught expected me back for only one more year. I couldn’t see the point of hanging on. The chairman’s lies still stung.

      “It’s not the kind of thing we had hoped for from you.” Assistant professors have no rights. Only tenure gives an academic job security.

      It was a small school, but had an influential bunch of scholars. If they rejected me, I’d have trouble finding work. I couldn’t just look in the want ads under “Historian.”

      “I fought for you,” the chairman said, needing, for his conscience, a final lie.

      I know, in my heart of hearts, that white men are not the enemy. My father was a white man, and he loved me and my mother even when she grew strange and crazy, before the end. I know white men are not evil, but I have to keep reminding myself. It keeps me confused most of the time. I’d just avoid thinking about it, if I could.

      “I fought for you, but it just didn’t work out.” The chairman could hardly wait to see me gone.

      We finished the washing. I stayed at the sink, peering into the dark window, and told Mrs. Fern the story of losing my job.

     

* * *

      Schuylkill College perched on a hill above its namesake river. The stream bounded Philadelphia west of City Line Avenue. From the campus, the view stretched from the sheds of the rowing clubs in the northwest to the Art Museum in the opposite direction. I parked the car and headed for the history building. One chore left.

      The secretary, Diane, was sympathetic. “He’s got your check, Dr. Griffin.” She pointed at the door to the chairman’s office. The semester was over, and Schuylkill didn’t have a summer term. “He said something about an exit interview.”

      “Thanks for the warning.”

      My tennies squeaked on the tiled floor of the hallway. Doctor Pflugerman would hear me coming, and know who it was. Only students and his maverick assistant professor, now retired, dressed so informally. The high gloss of wax on the tile didn’t help at all.

      Maybe he hadn’t heard, though. I got past his door and ducked into my office.

      The bookshelves were empty, except for a patina of dust. My books were in storage. I sat at the desk and opened one drawer after another, a final check before finishing this forever. A few stray pencils and pens, the odd paper clip, rattled.

      “You’re too prickly, Griffin.”

      This was from the man who—I had it on Diane’s authority—cast the deciding vote against me at the tenure meeting.

      “Me, Pflugerman?” I returned him exactly the amount of respect he offered me.

      He held a white window envelope between thumb and forefinger. I halfheartedly reached for it before he snatched it away. It was an accustomed game between us. He played it when he wanted me to pay attention to him, as if he believed he wasn’t worthy of notice unless he had something I wanted. Maybe I was a too-willing accomplice in the game.

      “I don’t want to play.” It was just too much effort. “What do you want?”

      He dropped the last paycheck on my desk.

      “I’m sorry about your father.”

      I nodded. If I bit my lip hard enough, maybe I wouldn’t cry.

      Pflugerman waited until I gained control.

      “I like you, Griffin.”

      That was a surprise. I looked up.

      Pflugerman was a small man, in his late fifties, pudgy and soft around the middle. He had been chairman of the history department for a dozen years. He had spent the last decade trying to leverage it up into national prominence, no easy task in a small, private college in an eastern city. I’d been a part of that effort, for a while.

      “You could have voted for me, then.”

      “There was no point. I fought for you, as much as I could. The truth is, Griffin, you make people uncomfortable. And you didn’t publish in the right journals. Your work, frankly, isn’t what we’d hoped for from you—too impressionistic, too subjective.”

      We’d been over this ground before. “And not black enough for you.”

      Pflugerman harrumphed. Discussions of race put him on the defensive. He pretended to be color-blind, but no one is.

      “Your background made us hope for a more—”

      “I’m leaving tonight.” There was no point in rehashing old arguments.

      “So soon?”

      “Why stay?”

      “Most people would take some time, give it some thought.”

      The trouble was that Pflugerman did care, but voted against me anyway. Professional sports didn’t invent the salary cap. Without me, he could afford a hotshot urban historian who already wanted to do the kind of work that I hadn’t. I’d tried, God knew, but the thing that drew me was my papa’s heritage. I was black, but I was white, too—English, by at least half, maybe more.

      And if the truth be told, I felt a great relief at becoming free of academia. Public politics are nothing compared to academic infighting. The meanest, roughest, and toughest of politicians could learn a thing or two from an associate professor up for promotion. And there would be no endless pile of blue books to wade through, no slack-jawed suppliant begging at the last possible instant for a way to improve a grade that was etched in stone from the first missed exam.

     

* * *

     

      Mrs. Fern busied herself wiping up the table and putting things away. The dark window held my eyes.

      “What are you working on now?”

      That was the question.

      “I had an offer,” I said, “from some local people.”

      “You don’t mean the Communion, do you?” The surprise in Mrs. Fern’s voice turned me around. Her eyebrows rose, her eyes widened. Her lips compressed in a vain attempt to hide a smile. The tiniest fragment of a snicker escaped her efforts at control, before she turned away.

      Once, I wrote in a grant proposal that I wanted to “explore certain aspects of religious behavior and its impact on the historical chroniclers of medieval England, focused on the work of the chroniclers of Saint Albans abbey.” That’s academese for I didn’t understand why things came out the way they did and I’d like someone else to pay me to make the attempt.

      Pflugerman had sent a copy to the Communion of the Saint. I had a mental image of him chuckling as he addressed the envelope, over sending me off to confront a group of dotty English antiquarians. As nearly as I could tell from the States, they were a group of wealthy locals who felt that the church was giving their patron short shrift. They didn’t appreciate demythologizing, and weren’t shy about saying so. My faculty chairman, anxious to be rid of me, had written them a glowing recommendation; I owed him something for that. Whether it was revenge or thanks I didn’t yet know. When I lost my hope for tenure, the next thing in my mailbox was their offer. I responded, partly because they could pay, partly because it meant a free trip, partly because I didn’t know what else to do.

      Working for the Communion would be a comedown, but it was better than not working at all.

      “I haven’t taken the job yet. So far, it’s only a scouting trip. I’m to meet a Lady Phelps from the society tomorrow. They’re expecting me to be at the hotel.” I explained how I had missed my room. “I’ll have to make contact, somehow.”

      “Leave that to me,” Mrs. Fern said. She had an inward look. A small smile played across her lips. “You’ll need your rest.”

      “I think I could sleep a little, now.” I stood, still wrapped in the heavy white robe. “Thank you for the tea and sympathy. And the dressing gown.”

      “I’ll wake you. If you sleep late, you won’t be worth anything tomorrow.”

      “I don’t want to be a bother,” I protested. Not, I’ll admit, very convincingly.

      “Dear heart, why do you think I’ve opened a bed and breakfast? It’s good to have someone to look after.”

      The voice didn’t bother me this time. I managed to get out of my clothes and wrap myself back up in the bath robe. I fell into sleep like Alice going down the rabbit hole.

Chapter 2 will follow shortly.

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