Truth and Consequences (28 page)

Bill, when she reached him, was quite untroubled. “I told you so weeks ago,” he said, laughing. “I said Delia wouldn't be able to take the winter, didn't I?”

“Yes, you did,” Jane admitted.

“You should be pleased, after all the trouble she's caused.”

“Well, I am, in a way,” Jane agreed wearily, thinking, If only you knew. “But it always looks bad when a famous visitor cancels a lecture or walks out on the University. And now I have to write to everyone on the council, and Dean Lewis, and the people at Knight Hall, and they'll all blame us.”

“Of course they won't. Visiting professors do this kind of thing all the time—especially artists. There was a case just the other year in the Music Department, involving a frozen cello, as I remember.” He laughed.

“Yes, I heard about it,” she said.

“And now you can get a new state-of-the-art copier.”

“Well, that's true,” Jane said, expressing but not feeling enthusiasm.

What is the matter with me? she thought as she hung up. I used to get a lot of satisfaction out of going into a crisis and putting everything to rights. But now it just makes me tired. I feel as if I were pushing a stone uphill—no, not a stone, something bigger and uglier, like a dead cow.

Next Jane called Lily Unger, who turned out to know the news already. Delia had confided in her yesterday, she admitted, because she knew Lily would understand and would keep her confidence. (
Unlike you and most other people
, was implied.) And Lily did understand, completely. Delia was so sensitive, and Southerners just weren't prepared, biologically or psychologically or even spiritually, for our northern winters, were they?

“I suppose not,” Jane said, thinking that Lily was probably parroting Delia's excuses. Well, maybe that was the way to go—the letters could, should, say that Delia was resigning for health reasons.

“So you have to be gentle with her. You have to remember that she's not a tough winter-hardy plant like you, with generations of rural ancestors.”

What the hell did that mean? Jane thought. Well, it meant that Lily was a snob, no surprise really. Okay, my grandfather and great-grandfather were farmers, and I'm not a Southerner, but so what?

“Of course, we'll all miss her terribly. But what really counts, after all, is her writing, isn't that true?”

“I suppose so.”

“I expect everyone's a bit upset at the Center, though.”

“Well, yes. Some of them are,” Jane agreed.

“I have friends here to lunch, but I'll be over as soon as I can.”

“You don't have to—” Jane began, but Lily had hung up; it was not like her to miss any crisis.

In fact, many people at the Center were upset. At the buffet lunch Davi Gakar, Charlie Amir, Selma Schmidt, two visiting graduate students, and the entire catering staff from the Hotel School had hovered over Delia, regretting her departure, fetching her plates of food, and presenting books for her to autograph. Delia, looking pale and a little weary in a flimsy gray-blue tunic and long skirt, with her golden-spaniel curls pulled into a ponytail and hanging loose down her back, thanked them all effusively, with Southern spaniel charm. She assured Charlie that no one had ever before understood how to make a cup of coffee exactly the way she liked it; she promised Davi to send his children a signed copy of her Southern folktales.

In the office, Susie was eating crackers and drinking soda from a can and sniveling as she typed, and Selma Schmidt, red-eyed and weepy, was banging about pasting address labels onto cartons of Delia's books and papers.

“You don't have to do this today,” Jane told her. “I mean, surely some of these books can be stored at Delia's house for a while—” Oh, hell, she thought. It's not Delia's house, it's the Vogelers' house. It's rented until next May fifteenth—but if Delia and Henry leave, who will pay the rent? She realized with a sinking feeling that there was no lease, only a file of letters, several of them signed by her, Jane, as director of the Center. It had never happened before that a Visiting Fellow had left in the middle of the year, and nobody had asked for an official rental agreement. But maybe Delia and Henry were still liable. Or maybe I am, Jane thought, already beginning to feel exhausted. I must talk to Bill Laird. I must remember to make sure that this never happens again.

Only Alan was not caught up in the general low-level hysteria, she realized. At the start of the lunch hour he had made himself a ham and Swiss cheese sandwich from the buffet table, picked up a bottle of sparkling water, and retreated to his office. Maybe he was trying to avoid Delia, as Jane had asked him to do. Maybe she had been wrong and even wicked to suspect and spy on him for the last couple of weeks. Maybe, even, nothing much had been happening that day in Delia's office.

I must give him time, I must try to be more patient and more affectionate with him, Jane told herself, as her mother and Reverend Bobby had been telling her and she had been telling herself ever since she moved back into the house. And why should that be so hard? Alan wasn't difficult and demanding now, not often anyhow. Instead, he was distant and preoccupied. Sometimes he would ask her to fetch something or do an errand for him, but he usually asked politely, even apologetically, and afterward he thanked her politely. “Thank you. You're a very kind person,” he had said just the other day, as if she weren't his wife anymore, but a houseguest or a distant relative.

Most of the time, when Alan was home, she couldn't talk to him at all, because he was wearing headphones that looked like black chrome and rubber snails and listening to his CDs, or to the books on tape he kept ordering by mail or taking out of the local and University libraries. “It helps me to concentrate, and forget the pain,” he had told her last night when she finally asked if he had to have the headphones on all the time.

When they ate dinner together he took off the headphones, and responded to her questions and comments, but almost never initiated any. And as soon as she put her fork down, he would begin to clear the table and put things away, groaning sometimes with pain as he stooped to place a heavy pan on a low shelf, but refusing her assistance. “No,” he would say. “This is my job.” Then he would retreat to his study to work on his peculiar new drawings: plans for sculptures of open windows and doors and fragments of empty rooms. All empty, like their marriage, Jane thought as she looked at them, nobody there, nothing left.

More than once, as she sat alone in the evening, or lay awake in bed alone (Alan was still sleeping in the study, and when she had suggested he move back he had said he often got up at night and didn't want to disturb her) the depressing thought came to her that he had never asked her to return to their house, she had just gone and done it.

The worst thing was that she kept thinking about Henry, something she mustn't do. It didn't matter that Henry was so kind and strong and honest and healthy and had curly dark hair and loved her. He was also weak and unreliable. She had to put him out of her mind and keep trying to repair her marriage, as she had promised she would. Alan was ill, he needed her. That was what she had to remember. Things had to get better between them: after all, they had loved each other once, they had been happy together all those years when everything was all right and they were friends.

Trying to shove these repetitive thoughts aside, Jane turned to her computer and began to compose the letter to the dean. But as soon as the words “for health reasons” appeared on the screen, she sighed and stopped. “Susie?” she asked. “Did Delia say why she was leaving?”

“Uh-huh,” replied Susie. “Well, not exactly. She just said she had to go because it was so cold and she couldn't work here.”

“I see.” For the first time it struck Jane that as the director of the Unger Center for the Humanities she, not her assistant, should have been the person to whom Delia announced her resignation. That she had neglected to do this was rude, even insulting. Probably Delia had wanted to avoid speaking to her: in fact, they had both been avoiding each other ever since the awful scene upstairs. All the same, it would have been right.

But of course Delia cared nothing about what was right. If she had, there would already be a proper letter of resignation. Jane groaned as she realized that before she could write to the dean and the council she would have to obtain such a letter.

Lunch was now over, and except for Susie, and Selma with her piles of books and cartons, the ground floor was empty. Pushing the invisible dead cow ahead of her, Jane slowly climbed the stairs and stood in front of Delia's door. From behind it she could hear a murmur of voices, and a sensation of awful events about to repeat themselves caused her to recoil and glance across the hall. But no: Alan was in his office, standing at his drafting table with his back to her.

Taking a deep breath, she knocked. There was no response.

“Delia? Are you there? I'm sorry to disturb you now, but I have to speak to you,” Jane said, realizing that this was a lie: she did want to disturb Delia, now and always.

Silence. Then the door opened a few inches, but the face in the gap was that of Lily Unger.

“It's Jane,” Lily announced.

There was an indistinct response from within, then the door was opened fully.

“Thank you,” Delia said, rising from the sofa. “Darling Lily, thank you so much for everything.” She put a hand on Lily's arm and, without seeming to, conveyed her into the hall. “Really, I'll be all right,” she added with a long soft sigh. “I'll call you tonight. I promise.

“Oh, Jane. I'm so exhausted,” she said, shutting the door. At lunch Delia had looked pale and tense; now she seemed almost ill. An unkind smear of winter light from a gap in the curtains lit her face, exposing bruised violet hollows around the huge gray watery eyes and crepey skin beneath them, roughened rouged cheeks, and a sag of flesh under the chin. Why, she's old, Jane thought. Bill was right; she's much older than she told us: over fifty maybe.

“And I'm cold all the time,” Delia moaned. “So cold.” She shivered and clutched a slate-gray fringed pashmina shawl more closely around her shoulders. “I think I must be coming down with something.”

“I'm sorry to disturb you,” Jane repeated, this time sincerely,

“No, I'm happy you're here. It's my appointment book: it was right there on my desk, and now it's vanished. It's black, with a scarlet pimpernel on the cover—for assignations, you know—and my whole future is in there.” Her voice rose to a soft wail. “I can't go on without it. Please. My head hurts so—and my eyes. Maybe you can see it somewhere.”

She's old and ill, Jane thought, old and ill and frightened; Henry doesn't love her; he loves me. She felt a tremor of compassion. “Well, okay. I'll try,” she said. She went to the desk and began to turn over drifts of paper. Many of them, she noticed, were sheets of the expensive heavy lime-green poster stock that Delia kept taking from the supply cupboard, with only a line or two scrawled on each one.

“Maybe it fell off the desk,” she suggested, but Delia only looked at her hopelessly. Sighing, Jane dropped to her hands and knees and crawled under the big oak desk, where the wastebasket had been overturned and the oriental carpet was littered with scrap paper. She crawled closer and began shuffling through the debris.

“Wait—is this it?” She held up a small notebook.

“Oh yes! Oh, thank you, thank you.” Delia snatched the book, giving Jane a wonderful smile.

“You're welcome,” Jane said, backing out awkwardly, smiling too. She remembered something Henry had said, that we always feel kinder toward people after we have helped them. But maybe that could work both ways.

“Well, now you've got to help me,” she said, standing up. “I have to write to the dean and the Humanities Council today, and I need an official letter of resignation from you.”

“A letter?” Delia put one hand on her forehead, as if a migraine were churning there under the tangled golden tendrils. “I don't understand. I'm not resigning, it's just the cold here, the darkness, it's making me so horribly ill—”

“Susie says you told her you were leaving town tomorrow.”

“Oh, I am, I must. But as soon as I'm better—at least, I hope so—Lily says January can be very beautiful here, with radiant sunny days, and the snow gleaming like sugar frosting.”

“Yes, it can,” Jane admitted. Lily Unger put you up to this just now, she thought. She suggested that if you go on leave, instead of resigning, your paychecks and health insurance will continue. That's what you were thanking her for.

“And the spring, too. She says that in April the hill below the University is covered with golden flowering sythia trees.”

“Forsythia,” Jane corrected. “It's a bush.” Delia's not going forever, she thought. She'll be back, and Henry will come with her, and I'll see him again. A surge of joy washed over her.

“Oh yes? I should like to see that, so much.”

“Well. In that case, we'll need a request for a medical leave of absence. I'll get Susie to type up a letter for you to sign.”

“Oh, but I can't do that. I'm not ill, really—it's just that I can't work here. It's the chill, the darkness. The town is so ugly now, and so full of ugly boring people. . . .” Delia gazed at Jane, her eyes wide with appeal.

And I'm one of them, Jane thought. She hardened her heart. “That's up to you, of course,” she said. “But if you're not in residence, and there's no medical leave form on file, the accounting office in Knight Hall will stop processing your paychecks.” This statement was probably a lie: the payroll office would not stop Delia's checks unless they were told to do so. But when you deal with immoral people, you become immoral. You touch pitch and are defiled, as the Reverend Bobby had said just last Sunday.