Fool's Journey (18 page)

           
“I really want to help on this,” he whispered fiercely.
“Okay?”

           
What a great kid, she thought. He felt the wrongness of
Vibert’s end, too. She nodded mutely as she took the pages from him.

           
 
Freemont’s voice
droned on from the front of the room. Then she realized he was addressing her.
“And the image, ‘Dolls in the trees,’ don’t you find that unusual, Professor
Kildeer?”

           
At the sound of the words, she felt her heart sink to her
stomach like a lump of lead. Her mouth went dry. The poem on the board was one
of her own from many years ago. From the time when she was known as Katie
McClellan. She had expected it, but the sense of invasion she felt was still
shocking.

           
“Wool-gathering, Professor Kildeer?” Freemont chortled.
“Perhaps I should read it to you?”

           
Her students looked at her expectantly. Oddly enough, the
world did not spin about her. She was grounded in memory, in the childish
tragedy the poem had grown from.

           
“Go ahead,” she said quietly. There was no going back
now. What would happen, would happen. Freemont grinned at her and turned to
recite from the board.

Suntime
and moontime

Oh lyricsome sweet!

Through the pages we danced never
fast enough

Make a wish—hold your breath

Always

Suntime and moontime

Dolls safe in the trees remembering
always

The multi-told stories

As in poems we curled up as the old
moon smiled down

And lyricsome sweet

Spun our destitute dreams.

As the words spilled from his mouth, the
years slipped away. She saw herself as a gangly adolescent, reading aloud the
poem she had written for her mother. In the interior life they had shared amid
the hell her father had created, poetry was the sustenance that fed their
souls.

           
It had not been enough, of course. In the end, it was
pain and anger that transformed them. All of them had been caught in the vortex
of hatred, and only Deirdre still walked among the living.

           
“So, Professor Kildeer?” Freemont prodded when he was
done. “The imagery?”

           
“I
wouldn’t dream of interfering, Professor Willard. You chose this poem.”

           
The students turned expectantly to the front of the room.
Freemont cleared his throat.

           
“I appreciate your deference, Professor Kildeer,”
Freemont began. “Shall we begin with the line I cited earlier? ‘Dolls safe in
the trees...’ What do you make of it, class?”

           
Why was he so interested in that particular line? It was
fraught with meaning for her, but no one else could possibly guess what it
meant. It reflected one distant pain, a small one compared with all the others.
It was one of her first rebellions against her father’s cruelty. He had caught
her in a tiny transgression and had told her he would burn her dolls that
night. He had told her to have them waiting when he came home from the office.

           
Small Russian Lena, Violet the ballerina, round-cheeked
Bobbin. All their bright eyes and sweet faces begged her for rescue and she had
hidden them in the branches of a holly bush, had scratched herself bloody in
doing so. He had not found them, and she had not been starved or ostracized
into submission either. Those were the days when his experiments were still
carried out tentatively, with an eye toward the school and neighbors.

           
“It sounds familiar to me.” Todd’s voice broke through
the rush of memory.

           
She glanced in his direction. He was tilted back in his
chair, looking smug, as ever, but he and Freemont exchanged glances as if they
were in collusion.

 
          
"I
think I've read that line in some other poem," Todd mused. "It wasn't
this one, though."

Freemont emitted a brief, dry chuckle. "That sort of
thing happens in poetry. The literary term is allusion, but, of course,
Professor Kildeer will have discussed the basic vocabulary with you already. In
allusion, you recall, the poet alludes to, refers to another work. Can anyone
give me an example?"

Adam
raised his hand tentatively. "The opening of
The Wasteland
is an allusion to
The
Canterbury Tales
, right?"

"Quite
right," Freemont nodded.

"But
the reference isn’t supposed to be exact," Lisa said. "It's more like
an echo than a quote."

"Nicely
put," Freemont nodded. "It shouldn't be an exact quote."

Deirdre
frowned. Where was he going with this? He had succeeded in getting her
attention, showing for certain he knew what she feared. But there was something
else going on. What was it?

"Does
anyone else find the line familiar?" Freemont prompted. "An allusion
should always be clear to a well-read audience, after all."

           
Lisa started to say something, then looked over at
Deirdre as if puzzled.

           
Freemont waited a moment, then said, “Perhaps it will
come to you eventually. If anyone remembers, let me know. I’d be curious to see
how broad your knowledge of modern poets is.”

           
So
he wasn’t going to leave this battle between the two of them. He was attacking
on all sides. His speed surprised her. He seemed more like the sort who would
draw out the pain with small threats. Instead, he was going for it all at once.
An amateur sadist. Well, she had overcome a virtuoso. Her father had reeled out
the painful path of their lives like a roll of barbed wired. But he, too, had
underestimated her. He thought she was as passive and compliant as her mother.
He had been very wrong.

           
The act of murder had taken its toll on her life, but it
was nothing compared to living with the devil. Whatever happened next, she was
equal to it.

XXIII.

           
In her cramped office, Deirdre waited for Freemont. If a
confrontation were going to take place, she would rather maintain the slight
security of her own territory than chance unequal footing elsewhere. Still, as
the hours plodded by, she grew less certain. From time to time, she heard his
voice in the passage, speaking to students and other faculty. Once, he even
stood right outside the partially open office door, even put his hand on the
doorknob, then went away. He was playing with her, trying to draw out her
anxiety as long as he could, just as her father had done.

           
Deirdre dug her nails into the palms of her hands to
dispel the memory, but the images reappeared anyway, as red with blood as if it
were today. There was so very little difference: a man who hated women had
found her.

           
Freemont was a fool, though, if he thought she would balk
at defending herself. How could he possibly think she would hesitate? He knew
who and what she was. Did reputation mean so much to him that he assumed she
would sell her soul for its safety?

           
She glanced at the clock. It was after five p.m. If
Freemont were waiting to confront her after the staff had left, he would be
disappointed. She swept up her keys, crammed a pile of papers into her satchel
and left the office.

           
The corridor was deserted, one flickering fluorescent
bulb lighting a surreal path past the line of closed doors. Freemont’s door was
shut and the light was off. Deirdre felt a wave of sickness wash away from her.
Their confrontation was merely delayed, but knowing that the day held nothing
more of him lifted her spirits. She would sleep tonight and face tomorrow when
it came.

           
Even though a light rain was falling, Deirdre got off the
bus a few stops before her home. Several of the stores at the bottom of Queen
Anne Hill beckoned to her with their bright windows and foolish extravagance.
It felt so good to be an ordinary shopper, buying pretty greeting cards,
stationery for letters she would never mail. It felt so good to blend with the
normal.

           
Too quickly, though, the clerks began to close out their
tills and glance meaningfully at their watches. Unwillingly, she stepped out
into the rain once more and looked up the street. The long slope of the hill
glowered down. Five minutes would take her home, but the thought merely
intensified the coldness she felt at her center. Damn. She didn’t want to go
back and sit through the evening alone.

           
Across the street, the flashing red neon of Nick’s
beckoned comfortingly. Dinner at the smoke-filled Lebanese restaurant sounded
comfortable and anonymous, and the service had a euphemistic reputation for
being leisurely. She was in no hurry.
 
Taking advantage of a gap in the traffic, she ran across the glittering
street and into the restaurant. The low wail of Middle Eastern music greeted
her, snaking its way around the tables and into the corners. The air was
redolent of garlic and lemon and edged with cigarette smoke.
 

           
“Table for two?” a dark-eyed hostess asked.

           
“Just
one,” Deirdre replied, feeling ambivalent about dining alone. A companion might
provide a wall of conversation, keep her inner eye from returning to the scenes
of the day. Panda was still out of town, though, and Manny Ruiz, for all his
distracting dark intensity would only focus on her problems.

           
As the hostess led her to a small round table lit with a
lurid red candle she knew that, if she had sought out this place as a means of
avoiding her problems, she had failed. The restaurant reminded her of Dmitri’s
where she had eaten with Bess Seymour just yesterday.

As
one who knew what exposure meant, she’d lay odds Bess had spent a good deal of
time second guessing herself, wondering if her confiding the tale of Diana
Vibert was more an act of betrayal than a path to revenge. The nights would
have been full of ghosts, more full than usual. What did Bess do to escape?
Work, of course, was always an answer. Deirdre glanced at the folders of
student papers peeking out the top of her satchel. She’d brought class papers
home as usual, and the light was just strong enough here to read a few and
write comments. It would keep her from staring into the shadows of this dark
restaurant and turning them into shades of memory.

           
 
Over a cup of
coffee, so thick it could have been syrup, she read through the last of the
poems. She was avoiding going home, but she granted herself permission to
relax. She had saved Adam’s and Mattie’s poems for last, not because they were
so much better or worse than anyone else’s, but she felt a bond with them. They
were the two students she'd connected with this term and she found herself
always giving their work more attention than the others.

           
She smiled when she saw that Adam had used a gothic
script on his poem:

The troll has found his princess
fair

and locked her far away

from princes brave where never may

their derring do have aught to play.

She weeps to see her hair grow gray

as time surrounds her day by day:

a prison strong that none may storm

embraces now her withered form.

Predictable
in form, but a nice little creepiness in the imagery. Getting a response from a
reader was a good thing. It would be better though, if he could strip away the
verbiage of old structure and make every word count. Strip away conventional
symbolism and bring his own meaning closer to the surface. They’d be having
one-on-one conferences next week, so she’d help him hammer through it then. She
made a few notes on the page and went on to Mattie’s.

The hand that moves by night

is here again, leading me to
nightmare land

My mother moon weeps softly

as she hides behind a cloud

Hope is an annoying mime I cannot
understand

It will not go away.

           
Deirdre frowned. Exactly the opposite of Adam’s, it was
almost too personal to make sense of. All the symbols were private. There was
little a reader could hang onto to create their own meaning. Despite that,
though, it was fresh and keen and full of sorrow. Lots of work to do, but if
Mattie could face whatever demon triggered it, the poem would be a good one.
This conference would probably be much more difficult than Adam’s.