Quoth the Raven(7)
Katherine got the jar of instant coffee, took a couple of spoons out of the rack next to the sink, and headed back to the table. Because there was no way to avoid looking out the window at the quad, she was faced for a few seconds with a. sight that grated on her nerves: dozens of students, dressed up in ridiculous costumes, milling around among the greenery and playing seduction games. Katherine wondered if Alice Elkinson was out there, showing off her engagement ring, acting like a teenager instead of a woman old enough to know the score. Then she sat down.
“Crap,” she said, to the air rather than to Vivi. “I’m so rattled I can’t think straight. Do you have a cigarette?”
Vivi reached into her pocket and brought out a pack of Marlboro menthols. She was a small woman, dark and attractive enough except for the fact that she was oddly lumpy. A decade of weight-training and macrobiotic diets had twisted her out of shape. She got a blue Bic lighter from her other pocket and lit Catherine’s cigarette.
“I think you’re jumping the gun,” she said. “I mean, I think you’re panicking before you have to. After all, nothing has happened yet.”
“A lot has happened,” Katherine said. “This time last year, there was a Women’s Studies Department. This time this year, there isn’t.”
Vivi brushed this away. “That was our fault, not some plot on the part of the administration. We didn’t go about it right. At Berkeley—”
“This is not Berkeley.”
“I know it’s not Berkeley,” Vivi said patiently. “My point is, if you’re going to keep a department like Women’s Studies alive these days, you’ve got to have the numbers. You’ve got to have your classrooms full. The way to do that is with sex and spirituality—you know, self-actualization courses. Instead, we had all that stuff about women’s historiography and the sociology of housework in the Middle Ages, all this linear-logic, male-dominated crap—”
“Vivi.” Katherine took a great drag on her cigarette, blew smoke into the air, and sighed. Sometimes, talking to Vivi gave her a headache. “The Faculty Senate would never have put up with the kind of thing you’re talking about. They barely put up with my witchcraft course and you know it. They’re so hyped on academic rigor.”
“They’re so hyped on male supremacy,” Vivi corrected. “We should have sidestepped them, Katherine. We should have offered a course like ‘Images of Women in the Art of the Renaissance’ and then done what we wanted with it. Talked about birth control in the sixteenth century. Run some consciousness-raising sessions. The word would have gotten around after a while.”
“Mary Gillman tried that two years ago,” Katherine pointed out. “She got fired.”
Vivi got that long-suffering look on her face, usually reserved for men. “Mary Gillman got fired because that stupid girl accused her of sexual harassment, and then the parents threatened to sue. That isn’t the point. The point is, I don’t see how all this ties in with Donegal Steele.”
Katherine looked at the tip of her cigarette, a red coal burning into the filter. She took the saucer out from under her cup and stubbed the butt out in it. “All right,” she said, “let’s do this as a sequence. Have you read Steele’s book?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Then you must know he isn’t a friend of ours. He thinks all the minority studies departments ought to be run off campus on a rail—I’m sorry. I’m making a mess of this. Anyway, he isn’t likely to be a big supporter of what we want to do.”
“What we have to do,” Vivi corrected.
“We’ll get to that later. The fact is, the administration didn’t even think about hiring him until old Yevers got sick, then they went crazy and offered him a ton of money and practically dragged him out here by the heels—don’t you ever wonder why he agreed to come?”
“Why shouldn’t he?”
“Why should he be bothered?” Katherine said. “He’s famous, after all. His book is a best-seller. He has all the money he wants. What are we except an obscure little liberal arts college in an even more obscure part of Pennsylvania?”
Vivi considered this. “We’ve got the best rated undergraduate major in American Studies in the country. Donegal Steele is a professor of American history.”
“He could have been a professor of history at Yale. Or at Harvard, for God’s sake—they’ll hire anything at Harvard as long as it gets its name in the newspapers. But Vivi, there’s one thing he couldn’t have gotten, at Harvard or at Yale or anywhere else but here.”