78

Pella walked through the Large Quad feeling something like herself. It was a blistering day in early August, two months since her father’s death, and the busiest day she’d had since that first awful week, when flowers and condolences were arriving from all over. Mrs. McCallister handled the arrangements and the thank-yous. Pella lay in the guest bed in the quarters, Mike at her side, and refused to cry.

She’d worked a short shift in the dining hall this morning. Then she’d eaten lunch with Professor Eglantine, who’d offered to supervise her in a one-on-one tutorial for the fall, and who’d insisted she call her “Judy.” Pella worried that Professor Eglantine, Judy, was just being kind, but then again she’d seemed to be enjoying herself, and it would be great to have her for a tutor and possibly, if it wasn’t too much to ask, for a friend. The syllabus they’d constructed, while Professor Eglantine picked unconvincingly at her Cobb salad, centered on the letters of Mary McCarthy and Hannah Arendt. All in all, it had been a very heartening lunch.

Now she was on her way to Dean Melkin’s office, on the ground floor of Glendinning Hall, to finalize the details of her enrollment for the fall. Pella wasn’t sure how many details still needed finalizing, or why Dean Melkin, whom she’d never met, was so burningly eager to finalize them. Granted it was August now, but he’d been calling the quarters all summer, beginning much too soon after her dad’s death, begging her to meet. Pella had put him off with a series of brief, widely spaced e-mails, saying she wasn’t yet up for a face-to-face but had been in touch with Admissions, with the Registrar, with Student Health. These other departments of Westish simply e-mailed forms to her, and Mike filled out the forms and dropped them off. Whereas Dean Melkin kept leaving pleading messages on the machine.

Dean Melkin was on the phone when Pella peered cautiously around his half-closed door. He smiled and waggled two fingers to indicate how many minutes he’d need. After precisely that many minutes he invited her in, a slender man in khaki pants and a too-large houndstooth jacket with elbow patches, youthful in that slightly fetal way of certain descendants of the upper British Isles, his pale hair beating a ragged retreat from all directions at once.

“Pella.” He smiled at her pinkly. “Thank you for coming in. I know this has been a very difficult summer.”

Pella nodded in an unforlorn way meant to indicate that they needn’t talk about it.

“If you’d ever like to chat,” he went on, “morning, noon, or night, please don’t hesitate. I’ve left my cell number on your machine, but I can give it to you now too.”

“Thanks,” Pella said.

They sat down. Arranged on Dean Melkin’s desk, beneath a Post-it that bore her name, was a tall stack of materials—materials regarding core requirements, online registration, foreign language requirements, AP credits, dining hall plans, health insurance. He began to talk her through them, or to try to, but each time Pella, after waiting a minimally polite period of time, quietly indicated that yes, and yes, and yes, it had been taken care of. Each time Dean Melkin, seeming oddly nervous, lauded her conscientiousness and moved on to the next already-taken-care-of matter.

“Last but not least,” he said. “Housing. It wasn’t easy to fit you in—we have limited flexibility regarding late admits—but I did some finagling, and I found not only a room for you, but I think an excellent situation.” He leaned back happily in his chair. “You’ll be rooming with a young woman named Angela Fan, who was not only the winner of this year’s Maria Westish Award, which as you may know indicates an extremely high level of academic accomplishment, but also recently published a chapbook of poetry with a small press in Portland. And she took a gap year last year to work on an organic farm in Maryland, so she’s also a slightly more mature roommate than you might otherwise have had.”

“Oh no,” Pella said. “I’m so sorry. I can’t believe I didn’t mention this earlier. I’ve been making plans to live off campus. In fact I just signed a lease on a place. With my boyfriend.” She didn’t know why she’d added the boyfriend part—it seemed too louche for the dean’s pink-tipped ears.

Dean Melkin looked very sad. “Ah,” he said. “Hm… it’s college policy that all freshpersons live in the dormitories, we find it encourages a robust immersion in college life. Even our nontraditional students…” There seemed to be a war going on within him, between his devotion to college policy and his desperate desire to accommodate her. Pella couldn’t help sagging in her chair a little, to magnify her grief—damned if she wanted to pretend to live in the dorms, to hustle from her and Mike’s place to weekly popcorn parties in the RA’s room.

“I’m sure it can be arranged,” Dean Melkin decided quickly, smiling for her benefit. “Your adjustment to Westish is the vital thing.”

Pella thanked him profusely, and thanked him some more, and stood to leave. But the look on Dean Melkin’s face had become so perplexed, so somehow needy, that she let her butt fall back in the chair.

“So you’re doing okay?” he said.

Pella nodded.

“Your father was a very interesting man. He had a… a way about him.” Dean Melkin plucked at the gold-painted buttons on the cuffs of his jacket. “Nothing meant more to him than having you here.” He looked up at her, his expression only growing in perplexity, so that it could even be called tortured.

“It was very sudden,” he said.

“Yes.” Pella nodded with the somberness that was both expected of her and easy to muster.

“That is to say… it was very sudden, then? There wasn’t some kind of… precipitating illness?”

“No,” Pella said. “Not at all.”

“Ah. Aha.” Dean Melkin wrinkled his turned-up, slightly fetal nose. He seemed dispirited by the lack of a precipitating illness. “It was very sudden, then, but it wasn’t… that is to say, it was…” He hesitated, pursed his lips. “It was a matter of natural causes?”

“Sure.” Pella peered at Dean Melkin, trying to figure out what he was saying. “What other kind of causes are there?”

“Oh, well. None, I suppose.” He looked up at her, his expression deeply pained. “But there wasn’t any way in which it could have been… or been construed as… intentional?”

What? Suddenly it felt like their entire meeting, not to mention his summerlong pursuit of her, had been building toward this moment of anxious prying. “My father died of a heart attack,” Pella said sharply. “For which my family has a strong genetic predisposition. The men, at least. The women live forever.”

“Ah.” Dean Melkin sank into his chair. He looked, though still uncomfortable, perceptibly relieved. “Well, then. It couldn’t have been avoided, could it?”

What was going on? Did Dean Melkin think that her dad wanted to kill himself? Why in the world would he think such a thing? Maybe because her dad had been so ruddy and hale and energetic; maybe it was difficult for Dean Melkin to imagine him just ceasing to live. But her dad was also so cheerful, so downright life-affirming, in his public persona, that she couldn’t imagine anyone thinking that he might commit suicide. And not just thinking it but thinking it with sufficient intensity to ask her about it, as Dean Melkin had essentially done, which was truly bizarre, not to mention seriously unprofessional.

Unless there was some reason for Dean Melkin to think it. Some inside info, some hurt or scandal or hidden rot in her dad’s life that she didn’t know about but that other people did. Was she going too far? Was she living inside her head again?

But Dean Melkin was sitting right there, acting so bizarrely, still fiddling with the buttons on the cuffs of his too-big imitation-dean jacket, not that he wasn’t a real dean, but he looked more like a watery kid who wanted someday to be a dean, and her point was that she’d arrived here in an okay mood, really the best mood she’d been in all summer, and it was Dean Melkin whose agitation was agitating her, whose strange behavior and strange words were causing her to think strange thoughts. It wasn’t her. It was him, and she had to get to the bottom of it. And if she thought of hurt and scandal in relation to her dad, well, she could think of only one possibility. Of one person.

“Of course,” she said with great gravity, “all this has been exceptionally hard on Owen.”

Dean Melkin looked more perplexed and tortured than ever. But not in a who’s-Owen-and-why-did-you-utter-this-strange-non-sequitur kind of way. No, it was more the perplexity of a person trying hard to craft a reaction to news he already knew. “Of course,” he said, nodding thoughtfully. “I can see how it must be very difficult.”

He knows, Pella thought. He knows about Owen. The dean of students knows about Owen. He knows about Owen and he’s wondering whether my dad committed suicide. And now she was wondering whether her dad committed suicide. Because the dean of students knew. And if he knew, he wasn’t the only one. Which meant that her dad had gotten strung up, or had been about to get strung up, or something.

Could he have killed himself? Was there a way to kill yourself that looked enough like a heart attack to fool people who expected you to have died of a heart attack? Well, yes, there had to be. But it just wasn’t possible. Her dad didn’t have a morbid bone in his body, had always been a terrible fraidy-cat where death was concerned. He didn’t like doctors, her mom at least partly excluded, and he didn’t like the pills that, paradoxically, reminded him he would someday die. No, he couldn’t have killed himself, though he had been smoking too much—she regretted not realizing that earlier, not harping on it more. When Mrs. McCallister found him his right hand was on his chest, gripped around his pack of Parliaments, which were thoroughly crushed.

“Within the administration,” she said, “I suppose that pretty much everyone knew about him and Owen.”

“No no no.” Dean Melkin straightened in his chair, tugged at the collar of his white oxford. “No no. It was only me and Bruce Gibbs, and I believe Mr. Gibbs consulted one or two other trustees, in a highly confidential way, just to gauge what the options were. Whether there were any options.”

There it was, then. He’d been caught. He’d been caught, and he’d been banished. Those bastards. And her father, what an idiot. He hadn’t told her. Had he told anyone? Had he told Owen? No—he couldn’t have. He wouldn’t have. If Owen had known, if she had known, they might have been able to calm him, console him, buck him up somehow. Instead he’d kept it all on that heart of his.

She had to get out of there. Not just out of Dean Melkin’s office—out of Westish, away from Westish. Like forever.

Dean Melkin was still worrying the buttons on his cuffs. Clearly he’d been waiting for this moment, had been living all summer with a weird guilt upon him.

“Pella,” he said, “I’m so very sorry. I wish there was something that could have been done differently. Of course your father was my superior, I had no real say in the matter, but the idea that there may have been some sort of connection between his resignation and his passing, well, it’s terrible, it’s just terrible…”

“I couldn’t agree more,” she said sharply, a promising beginning to a rant, but she felt too miserable to make a scene. Somehow she managed to get to her feet and swim out of the room, out of Glendinning Hall, leaving her stack of catalogs and carbon copies on the edge of Dean Melkin’s desk.

She had to get so far away from here. Mike was working at Bartleby’s tonight, was probably there already—when she calmed down she would walk over there and drink whiskey, and tell him why she had to leave. Would he come with her? Surely he would. She was willing to go anywhere he wanted, as long as it wasn’t here. Even Chicago would be far enough.

She was outside, sweating in the hazy afternoon sun, and she swung wildly around the campus in helpless, hopeless circles for a long while, down to the beach and back, out to the football stadium and back, here there and everywhere. She thought about her dad and how to avenge him. How to shun Westish in the most profound way possible. How to make the entire college and everyone involved with it know and understand that she and her father were shunning it in the most profound and everlasting way possible. She was full of rage but she wasn’t coming up with much.

She didn’t want to think about Dean Melkin, he was the last scourge-slash-person she wanted to think about, but something he’d said kept flitting through her mind, flitting and flitting until finally it just stuck there in the middle and nothing could get around it. “Nothing meant more to him,” Melkin said, “than having you here.” It was true, wasn’t it. It was all too true. She’d never know what her dad’s last minutes or hours or days were like, but one thing she knew was that Dean Melkin was right, and that no matter what had happened between her dad and Westish, her dad would have wanted her here. If she lashed out at Westish, in whatever impotent way she could lash out, then she’d be doing it for her, not for him. If she wanted to do something for him, it wouldn’t be that.

She wouldn’t tell Owen. To tell Owen would only make him feel awful and guilty, like he’d contributed to her dad’s death, and for what? For the sake of the sound of her voice. And to tell Mike would be pointless. She would keep it between her and her dad. And she would keep ramming the Affenlight name down the throat of Westish College, over and over, but not like that, not in a vindictive way—she would do it like her dad would want her to do it. She would settle in. She would read the letters of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy. She would be, to whatever extent was possible, at peace.

Without Pella realizing it, her wanderings had carried her, for the first time since the funeral, to the edge of the cemetery. Now she braced herself, entered the gate, and walked within sighting distance of her dad’s grave. She didn’t get too close; it was enough, it was hard enough, to be here, forty yards away, and to know that his flat headstone lay near that wide and knotty tree, which she recognized from the haze of the burial.

She would be here for the next four years, but he was gone, gone from this place, from every place, forever. That’s the deal, she thought, and the thought seemed to come from elsewhere, a visitation. That’s the deal.

She turned around, away from the headstone, and faced the lake. Waist-high waves flung themselves at the breakers. She thought of what she always thought of in a cemetery: her dad’s anecdote about Emerson digging up his wife Ellen’s body. Then, still gazing at the water, she remembered his old Harvard e-mail password, which she’d decoded as a kid without him knowing—landlessness, how obvious could you be? An idea was forming in her mind. Her dad had died as the president of Westish, his funeral had been full of pomp and circumstance, he’d been buried here in a spot of honor. And all of those were no small things. But there was a falseness to it too, to him being buried here. Now that he was dead he could be here and not be here; they, the Melkins and Gibbses of the world, could think he was here, while she would know the truth. He belonged out there, in the water, which he loved.

Maybe it seemed silly to construe an e-mail password as a person’s deepest wish, but now that the idea had occurred to her she knew that it was right. All the lashed sea’s landlessness again. Of course, she couldn’t do it alone. She headed back to the quarters, where they were still staying, to wait for Mike to come home.