Quoth the Raven(26)

Instead, she got up, went to her essential files cabinet, and opened the drawer for faculty schedules. She got Dr. Donegal Steele’s out and looked at it for the fortieth time since eight o’clock. There was a tradition at Independence College of leaving Wednesday afternoons free of classes, theoretically to give students a solid block of time for study. In reality, the tradition was maintained because it gave faculty a solid block of time to write. Like a lot of other senior professors with clout—and it bothered Miss Maryanne Veer no end that this man should have clout, when he’d only been at the college since the start of the term—Dr. Donegal Steele had contrived to have no classes on Wednesday at all. There was no reason for her to expect him to be in his office, or even on campus. There was no reason for her to expect him to put in an appearance in front of her desk, just to tell her that he wasn’t really lost.

Except, of course, that there was.

Miss Veer checked the schedule again—History of American Education, Tuesdays and Thursdays at ten; Religion in the New England Common School, Mondays and Fridays at twelve; Senior Seminar on the History of Ideological Attacks on the Western Canon, Mondays at five—then shoved the file back into place, angry at herself. If she had a real charge to lay at the door of Dr. Donegal Steele, it would be this: that he made her act in such uncharacteristic ways. Miss Maryanne Veer was not a ditherer. She had never aspired to being a ditherer. It was the pride of her life that she had always been able to make up her mind about what she wanted, make up her mind about what to do about it, and then go do it. Now, just because a man she loathed had been out of her sight a little over thirty-five hours, she was behaving like a veteran bimbo.

She had slammed the file drawer shut and gone back to her desk, determined to clear her paperwork and free herself for lunch, when Vivi Wollman came through the outer office door. Miss Maryanne Veer didn’t like Vivi Wollman much—partly because Vivi was the protégée of Dr. Katherine Branch, partly because she was so infuriatingly pathetic. Miss Maryanne Veer had been homely all her life. She knew what that required of a woman, if the woman was the least interested in not making herself ridiculous. She had learned early not to fawn, not to flirt, and not to hope. It had left her with only Margaret for company in her old age—which would have been inevitable in any case—but it had also left her with her self-respect. In Miss Maryanne Veer’s eyes, Vivi Wollman had no self-respect. For all the hysterical inflammatory talk about total feminism and learning to live your life without men, Vivi was a bundle of vulnerabilities and weaknesses, a walking open sore of fantasies unfulfilled. Miss Maryanne Veer didn’t like Dr. Katherine Branch much, either, but she didn’t have any of this to hold against her. Whatever it was Dr. Katherine Branch needed to fill the gap in her life, it didn’t have anything to do with men. In Miss Maryanne Veer’s eyes, that made it all the worse that Dr. Branch would take on someone like Dr. Wollman.

Dr. Wollman.

Miss Maryanne Veer folded her hands on top of her desk—on top of the stack of midterm grade reports really—and said, “Yes?”

There was a sprightly little jack-o’-lantern sitting on the counter that divided the outer office from the inner pen where Miss Maryanne Veer worked. Vivi Wollman picked up the lid of it, put it back on again, picked it up again. There was a votive candle in there that Miss Maryanne Veer had lit this morning when she first came in to work. Every time Vivi took the lid off the jack-o’-lantern, the candle’s flame sent up streams of heat that made the air above it look jellied. Vivi didn’t seem to notice.

Vivi put the lid back on one more time and said, “Well. Yes. Here I am.”

“Yes?” Miss Maryanne Veer said again.

“With my New Publications Report,” Vivi said helpfully and a little desperately. “You left a note in my mailbox yesterday. About its being late.”

“Oh,” Miss Maryanne Veer said. “Yes.”

Any other faculty member would have come through the swinging door into the pen and stood at Miss Maryanne Veer’s desk, but Vivi was easily intimidated and Miss Maryanne Veer had gotten into the habit of intimidating her. She watched impassively as Vivi, still on her side of the official divide, searched frantically through the pockets of her tattered baseball jacket and came up with a crumpled piece of paper. Then she rose majestically from her desk and approached the counter, the secretary of the Queen ready to accept a petition that was likely to be denied.

“I know it’s a mess,” Vivi Wollman was saying, “but I did type it, just like you asked me to. I’ve got such a heavy schedule these days, I just can’t seem to get around to the administrative details. I know the administrative details are important, Miss Veer, but the thing is—”