The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane Page 3

  “Thank you, Professor Chilton,” she said.

  “I knew when we admitted you to this program that you would excel. Your undergraduate work at Mount Holyoke was exemplary, of course. Your coursework and teaching have both been well remarked upon.” Rehm ahked thought Connie, then immediately chastised herself. Pay attention! This is important!

  He paused, gazing at her, index fingers pressed over his lips. “I wonder if you have started putting any thought to your dissertation topic,” he said. She hesitated, caught off guard. Of course she had expected to bring him a proposal shortly after her exam, assuming she passed, but she had counted on having weeks ahead of her to think things over. However, his attention signaled to Connie that her performance had guaranteed her new status within the department. Connie’s ears buzzed, like antennae that have picked up a vital piece of information written in a code that has been only half-transcribed.

  Academia, in many respects, forms the last bastion of medieval apprenticeship. She and Liz had discussed this idea before. The master takes the student in, educates her in his craft, shares with her the esoteric secrets of his field. The apprentice is a kind of initiate, admitted by gradual degrees into ever higher levels of mysticism. Not that most academic subjects were very mystical anymore, of course. But, by extension, the apprentice’s skill reflects on the master’s own ability. Connie realized that Chilton now viewed her as a particular asset to him, and that this new level of regard came with heavier responsibility. Chilton had plans for her.

  “I have a few ideas percolating, of course,” she began, “but nothing set in stone. Did you have something in mind?”

  He regarded her for a moment, and she could see something indistinct, almost serpentine, glimmering behind his careful, veiled eyes. Then just as suddenly the glimmer disappeared, replaced with the bemused detachment that he habitually wore in place of an expression. He sat back in his chair, propping the top of a bony knee on the edge of the table, and waved one wrinkled hand dismissively. “Nothing as such. Only I urge you to look vigorously for new source bases. We need to think strategically about your career, my girl, and we can’t do that if you are just revisiting the same old archives. A really marvelous, newly uncovered primary source can make you in this field, Connie,” he said, looking sharply at her. “New. New shall be your watchword.”

  Watchwuhd, thought Connie. If I don’t get out of here this instant I am going to say something that will truly embarrass me. Though why he would bother to tell her to look for new source bases she could not fully understand. Perhaps later he would tell her what exactly he had in mind. “I understand, Professor Chilton. I will give this some serious thought. Thank you.”

  Connie stood, easing her arms into her peacoat, pulling the scarf over her nose, and tucking her braid up under a knitted pom-pom hat. Chilton nodded appreciatively. “So you’re off to celebrate, then,” he said, and Connie fixed him with a thin smile.

  “Abner’s,” she confirmed, silently begging him not to come along.

  “You deserve it. Enjoy yourself,” he said. “We shall continue this discussion more concretely at our next meeting.” He made no move to rise and follow her, instead watching as she assembled herself to reenter the crisp spring world outside. As the door closed behind her, the last narrow stripe of sunlight vanished from the window, and the conference room went dark.

  CHAPTER TWO

  SINCE ARRIVING AT HARVARD, THREE YEARS AGO, CONNIE HAD SHARED three dark, wood-paneled rooms in a building that had, a century before, been a private dormitory for clubbable young Harvard men. It now held desultory pairs of grad students who shuttled, heads down, between library and home. Over the decades, Saltonstall Court’s Gilded Age splendor had faded behind successive layers of tobacco smoke, city grime, and plaster Spackle.

  Sometimes Connie thought she could feel the building’s palpable disdain for its sliding fortunes. Dark oak shelves now crowded with Connie’s history books and Liz’s Latin classics had held generation after generation of uncracked Greek textbooks and Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Even the brick fireplace evinced its contempt, belching forth smoke and ash on the rare occasions when the women attempted to kindle a fire. Connie tried to picture the anonymous, long-dead boys who had once lived in their rooms, buttoned into woolen suits, experimenting with pipes as an affectation, shuffling cards for bridge. Some of these boys had brought valets with them to college, and Connie wondered which room had been the servants’ room: hers or Liz’s.

  As she wove her way alone down Mount Auburn Street, after a blurry evening spent celebrating at Abner’s, she reflected: probably hers. It had the smaller window.

  The campus clock tower bonged once in the distance, and Connie’s tired hand fell on the dormitory apartment’s brass doorknob. The whiteboard nailed to her front door bore a scrawled note from the two chemistry students down the hall, wishing her luck on her qualifying exam, along with a cartoon version of her with a giant lightbulb illuminated over her head. Connie sighed and smiled.

  She could not remember the last time she felt unambiguously pleased with herself. Maybe when she had graduated from Mount Holyoke—that was a pretty satisfying day. She had not even known she was getting magna cum laude until she read her name in the class day program. Perhaps once more, when she was accepted to Harvard for graduate school a year after that. But nothing since then. For the first time, really, since beginning her PhD program, Connie felt secure. Validated.

  She slid her key into the lock and turned it silently, not wanting to disturb the sleeping Liz, who had stumbled home alone an hour earlier. As she slipped through the door and into the paneled hallway, two excited paws appeared, scrabbling at her feet.

  “Hi, Arlo,” she whispered, crouching down to enfold the wiggling animal in her arms. Something warm and damp lapped at her cheek. “Aren’t you a grody little guy,” she murmured. Connie scratched him behind the ears, and then she hoisted him up to her hip. She tiptoed with him into the galley kitchen off the study, groping for the light switch.

  The kitchen flickered, filling with buzzing fluorescent light, and Connie squinted her eyes miserably. She placed the dog on the floor and leaned on the counter by the sink, gazing down at the small animal. As usual she could not decide what precise variety of dog he was; on some days he looked more houndlike, with droopy ears and dark, wet eyes, but on other days she would resolve that he was definitely a terrier, the kind that can fit down a badger hole. His fur was an indistinct, dingy color, something between mud and leaves, which changed and shifted depending on the sunlight and the season.

  “So what did you do today?” she asked him, folding her arms.

  He wagged twice.

  “Yeah?” Connie said. “And then what?”

  The dog sat down.

  “That sounds like fun.” She sighed, turning to fill the teakettle at the sink.

  Connie had never had much interest in animals before Arlo; she had always found them worrisome and dependent, and the idea of keeping a pet touched a deep reservoir of anxiety within her. When she was troubled about her work back in college, as she often was, her dreams had grown populated by identical, replicating animals, snakes and mice or birds, all of them clamoring for food and care that she felt unable to provide. She had long regarded these dreams as an allegory for her worry about research, deadlines, and responsibility but nevertheless decided to take their lesson to heart. While the other women in her college cooperative dorm had brought home cat after cat, Connie held herself aloof.

  A few weeks into her first semester at Harvard, however, Connie emerged from an evening class in the philosophy building to discover the little creature sitting camouflaged under a rhododendron hedge, nearly invisible in the shadows among the leaves. He materialized from under the shrubbery and fell in step with her as she crossed Harvard Yard. At first she tried to shoo him away with one foot as he dodged and weaved in her wake. Stopping in front of the library, she told him to buzz off, pointing with her
finger back toward the philosophy building. He just wagged his tail, pink tongue flopping. Halfway across the Yard, she stopped again, telling him to go find his owner. But instead he followed her all the way back to Saltonstall Court, prancing through the door after her.

  For the first few weeks, she had posted flyers around Harvard Square advertising FOUND DOG, to no avail. Then she tried posting a few DOG FREE TO GOOD HOME flyers, until Liz made her take them down. “He chose you!” Liz insisted, and Connie smiled at her roommate’s unabashed sentiment. Liz was the sort of woman who studied medieval Latin because, secretly, she passed her hours imagining the days of knights battling mythical dragons, of ladies in wimples, and of courtly love. Connie appreciated Liz’s fervor in part because Connie was herself a sentimental person, the kind often masked in a defensive layer of irony and cynicism. Without admitting to herself what she was doing, Connie gradually stopped looking for someone else to take the dog.

  She never noticed that after Arlo entered her life, her nightmares about replicating vermin disappeared.

  Now she turned from the simmering kettle and found a note taped to the refrigerator, in Liz’s tidy printing. Grace called 6:00 P.M., read the note. Said call back ASAP. Late OK.

  “Look at this, Arlo,” said Connie, gesturing to the note. “Your real owner called.”

  He tipped his head sideways.

  “Aw, how could I say such things?” She chided herself for him, stooping to rub his cheek. “No, of course not really. It’s just my mother.” She checked her watch—1:20 A.M. That would make it…11:20 in New Mexico. Connie smiled, pleased that her mother had remembered that today was her exam day. Of course Connie had taken the trouble to remind her a few times, in her otherwise sterile, if dutiful, letters and on her mother’s answering machine. But for once the reminders had worked.

  Connie poured the steaming water into a chipped mug, dropped a peppermint tea bag into the cup, and moved into the darkened study. She pulled the chain on the lamp that stood arced over her reading chair, a chintz behemoth that she had found yardsaleing in Cambridge.

  The study was simultaneously spare and cluttered, fitting for two studious women. One wall housed the fireplace, framed by oak bookshelves overflowing with paperbacks and textbooks. Near the fireplace sagged a futon, a remnant of Liz’s college life, facing a table positioned to support resting feet. Two institutional desks stood pressed to the walls on either side of the bookshelf, Connie’s a picture of order, Liz’s a riot of papers shuffled into heaps. The fourth wall consisted of tall leaded windows sheltering a small forest of potted plants and herbs for cooking—Connie’s garden. By the plants sat her lamp and reading chair, under which she just glimpsed the disappearing rump of Arlo.

  Connie pulled her knees up to her chest and balanced the hot mug under her nose. She rarely bothered to notice this room, as she spent so much of her time in it. Before too long, the day would come when she and Liz no longer shared this warren. The thought tugged at her excitedly, but under the excitement Connie felt distant, even sad. Of course, that day was still far off. Connie sipped at her tea, allowing its astringent taste to draw her back into the present.

  Even for her mother, 11:20 seemed a little late. But the note had said to call as soon as she could. In truth Connie was so pleased that Grace had remembered her exam that she wanted to call now, even if it meant waking her mother up. In fact, she was not sure when she had last spoken with her mother. Had it been around Christmas? Connie had stayed in Cambridge to read for her exam, and they chatted on Christmas Day. But they must have caught each other on the phone since then. Connie knew she left messages, but she could not quite recall when she had actually reached her. Was it…

  Connie placed two fingers on her forehead with a soft groan. It was when Grace had called to wish her a happy vernal equinox, the moment in spring when daylight and nighttime are exactly the same length. Of course. That was typical of Grace Goodwin.

  In her more petulant moments, when she was younger and angry, Connie used the epithet “a victim of the 1960s” for her mother. As she grew older, however, she began to regard her mother with a detached, almost anthropological interest. Now the phrase that Connie produced when pressed to describe Grace was “a free spirit.” It was hard to know where to start, when talking about Grace.

  Perhaps Connie preferred to avoid discussing her mother because her own origin characterized Grace’s fundamental lack of planning. Connie had been the unanticipated result of a love affair that Grace had had her senior year at Radcliffe, in 1966. An affair that Grace had had with her graduate teaching assistant in Eastern religion, it should be said, a fact that Connie regarded with unconcealed disapproval, particularly now that she herself was in graduate school. Leonard Jacobs, called “Leo” by Grace and her friends. Connie’s eye drifted to the top shelf of her desk, where a black-and-white photograph rested, showing a sensitive, moist-eyed young man in a turtleneck, cheekbones high like Connie’s own, with long sideburns and tousled hair. He gazed directly into the camera, unsmiling, a young woman with her straight hair parted down the middle leaning against his shoulder and gazing dreamily off to the side. Grace—her mother.

  Leo’s thoughts about Connie’s imminent arrival had not been recorded for posterity, though Grace always intimated that they had made great, romantic plans. Unfortunately those plans were abbreviated by the machinations of foreign policy. Despite having drawn his research out for as long as he could, Leo finished his degree in 1966. He lost his academic draft deferment and was shipped to Southeast Asia three months before Connie’s birth.

  And while there, he disappeared.

  Connie’s sadness, yellowed with equal parts discomfort and distaste, was so great that she had never discussed it with anyone—not even Liz. When the subject of fathers came up in conversation with friends or colleagues, Connie skated quickly over the topic. Even reflecting on it now in the privacy of her study, her dog snoring under her reading chair, Connie frowned over her tea.

  Grace, meanwhile, had finished school, barely, and then established herself and her small daughter in Concord, not far from Walden Pond. An undistinguished farmhouse with a pronounced list, the collective—for that is really what it was—had stood hidden behind a few acres of woods, with two knotty apple trees tinting the air in autumn with the pungent smell of cider. Connie suspected that Grace had filled the house with people in part to push away the void that Leo’s loss had left. Whole coteries of warm, earnest young people traipsed through their house: musicians mostly, but also students, poets, women serious about pottery.

  Connie’s first conscious memory was a morning image of the kitchen of this farmhouse, warmed by a woodstove and furnished with a naked picnic table and potsful of thyme and rosemary. She was a toddler, roughly the same height as the table, and she was crying. She remembered Grace bending down until her open, young face was level with Connie’s, long straw-colored hair falling from her shoulders, and saying, “Connie, you need to try to center yourself.”

  Grace’s means of support during Connie’s childhood had been varied and obscure, including at one point a macrobiotic bakery, which failed to appeal to the staid New England matrons of Concord. Once Connie reached adolescence, however, Grace’s interests coalesced around something that she called “energetic healing.” Clients would seek her out, complaining of ailments both physical and spiritual, and Grace would effect a change in them by moving her hands through their biologic energy fields. Connie wrinkled her nose still whenever she thought about it.

  As a teenager, Connie rebelled by building around herself a predictability and order in direct contrast to her mother’s flexibility and freedom. Now that she was an adult herself, Connie viewed Grace with more sympathy. From the comfortable distance that stretched between her haphazard childhood and the chintz reading chair where she now sat, Connie could regard Grace’s eccentricities as being sweet, or naïve, rather than irresponsible and dissolute.

  When Connie left for Mount Holyoke, Gr
ace sold off what remained of the disintegrating farmhouse and moved to Santa Fe. Grace claimed at the time that she was ready to live somewhere “full of healing energy.” Connie scoffed whenever she thought of this phrase but then stopped herself. Her mother, after all, had a right to be happy. Connie could admit that her own life choices might seem incomprehensible to an outside observer, and doubly so to one as critical of established institutions as Grace was. Grace must have wondered how she ended up with such an alien offspring, and yet she had always supported Connie’s choices in her own unorthodox way.

  Grace probably tried terribly hard to remember that today was her exam day. She had never tried to insist that Connie not study history, not be bookish, not be serious and orderly. Grace occasionally wished that Connie would “investigate her soul truth,” but Connie always interpreted that as a hippie way of saying that Connie should just do what seemed right for her.

  Connie placed her empty mug on the floor and reached for the telephone.

  It rang four times, and as Connie was about to hang up, the receiver rose with a clatter and a breathless voice said, “Hello?”

  “Mom?” said Connie. “Hi! Liz left a note that you had called. I hope it’s not too late.” Her eyes lit up with a rising warmth of affection for this odd woman with whom life had yoked her together. Over the past year or so, Connie had invented more reasons to telephone, leaving messages peppered with questions; the ostensible need for answers carried a built-in need to call back. Her garden usually provided a good excuse.