§1 — Hook
The letter came on a Wednesday.
I read it once at my desk. Then I read it again, with the door closed, with the brass lamp pulled close. The departmental letterhead had not changed in fifteen years. The signature line had. Eleanor Hsu's name was not there. In its place was a name I had not said out loud since I was sixteen.
I set the page down on the desk. I did not move.
The TA office I had been assigned in my fourth year was on the third floor of Whitfield Hall. It had a leaded window, a radiator that knocked at unpredictable intervals, and a bookshelf I had filled with one citation index and three years of Eleanor's marginalia. Eleanor had the stroke in February. The first weeks she had been at home. The last six weeks she had been in a partial-recovery facility outside Boston. Her office hours had moved to one Monday afternoon a month. The dissertation was three chapters in. The defense was scheduled for May.
The dissertation chair appointment had been opened, the letter said, by departmental review. The new appointment was effective immediately.
The new appointment was Marcus Vane.
I had a way I read silence. I had developed it at sixteen and refined it through the years that followed and I knew, without looking up from the page, that the office on the other side of my closed door was empty, and the corridor beyond that was empty, and the building beyond that contained only the people who came in on Wednesdays and were not yet thinking about me.
The way I read silence was a way I had read for fifteen years. It was the way I read a seminar room. It was the way I read a citation. It was the way I read the inside of an envelope before I opened it. It was the way I had, on this Wednesday afternoon, read the inside of the envelope on the desk three minutes before I had taken the letter out. I had known, before I had read the name on the signature line, that the silence inside the envelope was the kind of silence I had not, in fifteen years, allowed in a room I was sitting in.
I read the page a third time. I picked up a pen. I drew a line under the name. The line was an inch long and exact. I did not write anything next to it. I had not written anything next to that name since I was sixteen.
Fifteen years.
I stood up. I put the letter into the inside pocket of my coat. I picked up my notebook and the seminar copy of the Whitfield Graduate Journal of Comparative Literature, vol. 47, in which my name still appeared in the table of contents next to a paper I had written when I was seventeen. The journal was the kind of object I kept at hand the way other people kept aspirin. I did not need it today. I took it anyway.
The introductory committee meeting was at three. It was eleven minutes after two.
§2 — Build
I walked across the quad with my hands in my pockets and the letter against the inside of my left forearm. The campus had the clarity it gets in the third week of February — the snow gone, the oaks not yet thinking about anything, the brick exposed to the cold the way old paper is exposed to a corrected reading. I walked the diagonal path, past the chapel, past the bell tower that had not, in fifteen years, kept time. I walked it at the pace I had walked across this quad five times a week since the September I had been sixteen.
The Comparative Literature building was at the far corner. I went up the wide stone steps, in through the front, and to the left. The elevator was out of service. The stairwell on the south side was the one I always took. The stairwell on the north side was the unlit one, the one with the back door to the third-floor seminar suite, and I had not used it in three years because Eleanor had asked me not to. The radiator in the south stairwell was running. I went up.
On the second-floor landing I stopped. I did not, until the moment of stopping, know that I would. I stopped because, halfway up, I had thought a sentence I had not thought in fifteen years. The sentence was: I am about to be in a room with him. The sentence was the kind of sentence that, said in the head of a person who had developed a way of reading silence, did not stop being said until it was said in a room.
I started walking again.
I went up.
The third floor had the seminar table, the small archive room, and the office of the chair. The door to the seminar room was open. I could see the long table from the corridor. I could see four chairs out of seven were occupied. I could see one chair was occupied by a man in a charcoal jacket who was not looking at the door.
He was looking at his hands on the table.
He was looking at his hands on the table the way a person looks when they have been told three days in advance that someone is coming, and they have spent the three days putting their hands in different positions, and they have, in the last four minutes, settled on this one.
I did not stop in the doorway. I do not stop in doorways. I went in. The dean's representative — a woman from the provost's office named Dr. Aldridge — stood and greeted me and gestured to the empty chair. The fourth committee member — Professor Tanaka, whom I had known since my second year — nodded. The third was a Princeton external I had not met before, a woman whose name I had read on the appointment letter and forgotten the second I read it.
The man in the charcoal jacket stood up.
He stood up the way a person stands when they have not decided, in the moment, whether the standing is the courtesy or the apology.
He said: "Ms. Callahan."
The room contained the chair he had risen from, the seven leather-bound volumes on the side shelf, the brass lamp on the table, the dust in the seam between the table edge and the wall, and one and a half seconds of perfect silence.
I said: "Dr. Vane."
The two and a half syllables of his name had not crossed my mouth in fifteen years. They came out with the precision of a citation. He did not flinch. He sat down.
§3 — Twist
Dr. Aldridge began the meeting.
Dr. Aldridge had a folder. The folder had the dissertation prospectus, the chapter three draft I had submitted in January, and the appointment paperwork. She walked through it. She talked about the timeline, the May defense, the Mellon postdoc letter from Princeton that the department had been told to expect. She talked about the May defense again. She used the phrase "continuity of supervision." She used it twice. The phrase was an institutional phrase. The phrase had — I knew, the way I knew the third-floor radiator was on at three in the afternoon — been in the policy handbook since 1987. The phrase had been used in every chair-reassignment meeting on the third floor of Whitfield Hall for thirty-eight years. The phrase had a meaning the institution wanted it to have. The phrase had, in addition, the meaning that the people in this room would, for the rest of the meeting, agree not to give it.
I watched Marcus Vane's hands on the table.
His hands were on the table. The left was flat. The right was a half-fist with the thumb at right angles, the way a person rests a hand when they are listening, not performing the listening. The Whitfield Graduate Journal vol. 47 was open in the folder under his elbow. I could see the corner of it. I could see he had brought it. I could see he had brought the volume in which the footnote appeared.
The footnote was on page 311.
I did not look at it. I had not looked at it in nine years.
Dr. Aldridge finished the paperwork. She looked at me. She said: "Nora, do you have any questions about the transition?"
I said: "I have a concern."
The room was the kind of quiet I had developed a way of reading. Marcus Vane's right hand on the table did not change position. His thumb did not move. His left hand did not move. He looked up.
I said: "I am happy to defend in May. I am not — given the timing, given Professor Hsu's expected return in the fall, given the irregularity of a chair change in February of a final year — I am not sure that this committee is the appropriate one for me to defend with."
I said: "I respectfully decline the chair appointment."
Dr. Aldridge looked at Marcus.
Marcus did not look at me.
He said, to the table: "The student has the right to request committee continuity."
He said it flatly. The flatness was the kind of flatness a person uses when they are giving an answer they have rehearsed. The flatness was the flatness of a man who has been preparing for three days to grant me the thing I was about to ask for.
Dr. Aldridge said: "Nora, there are funding considerations. The Mellon postdoc requires a defended degree by August. If we delay the chair appointment we — "
I said: "I understand."
I said: "I will think about it."
I closed the folder in front of me. I stood up. I said the necessary courtesies. I left the seminar room. I did not look at the chair he was sitting in. I did not look at his hands on the table. I went down the corridor, past the small archive room, past the chair's office, to the door at the end of the corridor that opened into the north stairwell.
I went into the unlit stairwell. The door swung shut behind me.
§4 — Cliffhanger
The north stairwell at Whitfield is unlit because the lighting renovation in 2011 stopped at the second floor. The third-floor landing has one bulb that does not work and one window with frosted glass that lets in a square of gray. I stood on the third-floor landing with my hand on the railing. I did not move.
I had thought I would walk down.
I did not walk down.
I did not walk down because, on the second-floor landing, one flight below me, a man's footstep had stopped.
He had come down the south stairwell. He had cut through the third-floor corridor — through the back office door to the seminar suite, the door I never took — and he had come into the north stairwell ahead of me. He had stopped on the second-floor landing. He had not gone any further.
He said, into the dark of the stairwell: "Ms. Callahan."
I did not answer.
He said: "I will sign the recusal Monday morning. If that is what you want."
I did not answer.
He said: "I have one thing I want to say first. To you. Off the record. If you will hear it."
The quiet of the stairwell had the quality of cold paper. The frosted window let in the kind of light you read by when you are sixteen and you have been awake the night before working on a footnote that will end a man's career.
I said: "Off the record."
He said: "When you asked me, in March of my Yale year — when you asked me what assumption underwrote the methodology — I gave you a two-sentence answer. I have rewritten the answer in my head every year since. I have not rewritten it because I wanted to say it to anyone. I have rewritten it because the answer I gave you was wrong."
He paused.
He said: "I have, for fifteen years, known the answer."
I did not answer.
He said: "I am telling you because you are about to leave the building, and I will sign the recusal Monday, and you will defend with Eleanor in May, and you will go to Princeton, and we will not be in a room together again. I am telling you so that you will know — if I never have the right to say anything else to you — that the question you asked when you were sixteen was the right question."
He paused.
He said: "And that I knew."
The frosted light through the window was the color of an old page.
I had a rule for what I did with the things people gave me off the record. I had developed the rule at sixteen. The rule was: I did not keep them.
I did not move from the third-floor landing.
I said, into the unlit stairwell, in the voice I had developed for the rule:
"On what assumption."
— to be continued in Ep2