“What?”
“Power.”
Vivi Wollman threw up her hands. “For God’s sake, Katherine, will you listen to yourself? You’ve gone totally paranoid. Power to do what? You just said yourself this was nothing but an obscure liberal arts college—”
“First the administration forces him down the throats of all the rest of us as Chairman of the Program. Then they boot him upstairs as Dean of Studies. Then he gets to make policy.”
“So what?”
Katherine got another cigarette out of Vivi’s pack and lit up herself. She felt dizzy, the way she always did when she got scared. The air in front of her eyes looked like patterned mayonnaise.
“Vivi,” she said, “listen to me. Tenure is all very well and good, but all it does is ensure that you don’t get fired for cause without a hearing. Did you know that?”
Vivi looked confused.
“Back in the seventies,” Katherine went on, “when the student population was down and the colleges started losing money and had to cut back on staff, there was a case that went before the AAUP arbitration board. Some small college in Ohio or somewhere cut a third of its faculty jobs and pink-slipped a lot of tenured people as well as nontenured ones. And the AAUP—”
“Had a shit fit,” Vivi said confidently.
“Not exactly.” Katherine took a deep breath, her hundredth of the morning, her millionth since she’d first worked all this out—and that had been less than four days ago. “The AAUP decided that colleges had to be free to cut departments they could no longer afford to run, and cutting departments makes no sense without firing professors, tenured or not. Vivi, you and I are professors without a department.”
Vivi Wollman blanched. “Oh,” she said. “Oh.”
“Exactly. If Donegal Steele gets what he wants—and he wants the highest administrative post he can lay hands on, trust me, I know the bastard—if he gets what he wants we’re both going to be out on our asses in less than a year. And you know what the job market is like.”
“But—”
“But nothing.” Katherine stood up, grabbed her cup and saucer, and threw them in the sink. The sink was full of dishes she never got around to doing and brightly colored sponges that seemed to appear out of nowhere. She picked up one of the sponges and tore it in half.
“It makes no sense for Donegal Steele to be here if the administration didn’t promise him at least a couple of significant promotions. It makes no sense for the administration to promise him a couple of significant promotions if their first concern isn’t getting rid of us. We’re being ambushed, Vivi. We’re being power-lunched right out of existence. If we don’t do something to stop it fast, we’re going to be up the brown creek without so much as a canoe.”
“Oh, Katherine.”
Katherine wasn’t listening. She had torn the sponge into shreds, and the ache in her head had turned into a ferocious pounding that felt like a jackhammer slamming against the walls of a decompression chamber.
“Oh, Christ,” she said, “I wish that nasty two-bit son-of-a-whore was dead.”
6
FOR KEN CROCKETT, THE problem with Dr. Katherine Branch was not that she was a woman, or a feminist, but that she made so much out of being a witch. He knew nobody believed that, but it was true. Even her name was a signal, the name of a woman who had been hanged for witchcraft in Puritan New England—not at Salem, but somewhere else. Ken didn’t remember the particulars. Like everyone else at Independence College, he had been treated to Katherine’s standard lecture on witchcraft in colonial America. Also like everyone else at Independence College, he hadn’t retained the details. Salem was just the tip of the iceberg. Five hundred people were hung as witches in New England between the founding of Plymouth Colony and the American Revolution. Whatever. Alice Elkinson, who knew more about American history than anyone Ken had ever met, said that Katherine’s research was not only lousy, but positively creative—but Ken didn’t care about that. He did care about his suspicion that Katherine Branch was not Katherine Branch’s real name. Unfortunately, he had never been able to prove it.
For Ken Crockett, the problem with Dr. Donegal Steele was entirely different. Ken would have had a hard time putting it into words he was willing to allow anyone else to hear. He had a hard time putting it into words he was willing to allow himself to hear. That was why he kept Steele’s book, The Literacy Enigma, out on the coffee table in his living room. Seeing it there that way focused him.
At the moment, The Literacy Enigma was covered with strips of black and orange crepe paper. The antique breakfront on the other side of the room, which had belonged to Ken’s mother, was covered with cardboard masks. The blue-and-green Persian rug Ken had bought in New York was covered with mud. The mess was making the small woman sitting in Ken’s mother’s blue-patterned wing chair look terribly uncomfortable, and Ken felt very guilty about that. The little woman was named Mrs. Winston Barradyne, and she had been of great help to Ken over the past fifteen years. Mrs. Winston Barradyne was the President—for life, Ken sometimes thought—of the Belleville, Pennsylvania, Historical Society.