Quoth the Raven(10)

“You’re not worried about what he might be up to?”

“No, of course not.”

“You’re much too easygoing,” Mrs. Winston Barradyne said. “You were like that even as a child. I remember how Lucy used to fret over you, always letting other children take your lunches and never hitting back.”

“Funny,” Ken said, “in the army, they used to tell me I was a regular savage.”

“Oh, the army.” Mrs. Winston Barradyne stood up. “You are much too easygoing, Kenneth, no matter what you like to think. I know you’re comfortable the way you are, but you ought to have higher ambitions for yourself. You’re a very accomplished young man. You shouldn’t let this—this fake take away your chance of promotion.”

“I don’t need a promotion, Mrs. Barradyne. I’ve got tenure. And it’s like I said. If I had to vote for a new Head of the Program, I’d—”

“Choose Dr. Elkinson,” Mrs. Barradyne finished for him. “Yes, I know. I happen to think Dr. Elkinson has more sense than that, though. I don’t think she wants to be Head of an academic department her husband is working in.”

“I’m not her husband yet.”

“But you’re going to be,” Mrs. Barradyne said. She had moved all the way to the door, walking carefully over the mud and between the scraps of crepe paper. She still looked worried. “I think you ought to sit down and give it some serious thought,” she said. “He really was very strange when he came to see me, and he got stranger after he looked through the files. I didn’t like the man, Kenneth, and I don’t think you should like him either.”

“I don’t.”

“I think you should do something about it for once.”

Mrs. Winston Barradyne twisted the knob, and opened the door, and stepped out into the hall. Like Ken’s apartment, it was full of crepe paper and cardboard masks.

“Really, Kenneth,” she said, “the man is up to no good. I’ve had two fine, upstanding husbands, and I know shenanigans when I see them.”

Then she pulled the door shut and made herself disappear.

On the other side of the room, the window began to bounce and jangle and sing. Ken turned around and found Lenore, pecking at the glass, asking to be let in.

He didn’t think he had ever been so frightened in his life.





7


“THE REAL PROBLEM WITH the people around here,” Dr. Alice Elkinson said to Dr. Lynn Granger, “isn’t that they play academic politics. I took my doctorate at Berkeley. Trust me, I know academic politics. The problem with the people around here is that they’re so damn Federalist about it.”

“That’s better than being so damn Marxist about it,” Lynn Granger said. She was standing on a chair, trying to be absolutely still, while Alice pinned up the hem of her white muslin ghost’s shroud. Alice was in a very bad mood. Originally, she had wanted the women faculty at Constitution House to dress up as witches, but Katherine Branch had had a total fit about it in the Faculty Senate, and that had had to be shelved. The ghosts’ shrouds weren’t nearly as good, being practically genderless. Alice Elkinson had always been very much at peace with herself about being female. Unlike many of the women she had known in her life, especially in graduate school, she had never for a minute thought less of herself because she was a woman. She had certainly never wanted to be a man. The idea of walking around in one of these white tents, when she had a body that belonged on the cover of Cosmopolitan magazine, made her positively furious.

On the other hand, she did not have a dress style that belonged on the cover of Cosmopolitan magazine. At the moment, she was dressed in her customary jeans, turtleneck, and tunic sweater—what she wore whenever she was not actually in class. Students used to seeing Dr. Alice Elkinson walking back and forth in front of a blackboard in three-inch heels and a Diane Chambers dress were always a little startled the first time they showed up for office hours. Alice had a tendency to meet her students while seated cross-legged on top of her desk in Liberty Hall. What with one thing and another—the thick cloud of honey blond hair that was perfectly natural; the finely etched bones of her Raphael face; the fact that she was only thirty-two, already tenured, and the country’s leading authority on original intent in the United States Constitution—Alice was something of a legend on the Independence College campus. She was also the only person in the history of the institution who had been granted tenure in under five years.

Now she stabbed the last pin in Lynn Granger’s hem and said, “Get that thing off and we’ll sew it. It’s dowdy as hell, but I don’t see what we can do about it at this late date.”