The Englishman

chapter 22

ON MONDAY I CYCLE ACROSS the Observatory parking lot, across Library Square, past Harrison Lab, along the river promenade, across the stone arch bridge into Ardrossan. When I hand the manila envelope to the elderly woman behind the counter in the post office, she says, “To England? This one’s sealed with a kiss, am I right?”

“Yes, you’re right. Wait—” I take it from her again and quickly kiss it for luck. “Oh—have I smudged it now?”

“No, it’s fine, dear. If half the love letters in the world were mailed with half the dedication as these…” She weighs and franks it. “That’s three thirty-one, please.”





Every other year the English department hosts its own Homecoming reception—what Nick Hornberger called “the black lining on the cloud of Family Weekend.” For two hours on Friday afternoon we will be welcoming English Lit alums, and they are sure to be interested in one thing and one thing only: the sex scandal. Hornberger lui-même will be conspicuously absent from this occasion but not, more importantly, from the opening ceremony at the new Institute for Cognitive Science, Linguistics and Psychology. Apparently there was a ruckus about this amongst the President, the Provost, and the Board of Trustees, but Hornberger insisted that he was innocent until proven guilty, and as such—that is, innocent—he had every right to celebrate the coming to fruition of a several-hundred-thousand-dollar project that he had been working on for over a year. Fair enough. Meanwhile the men who had to clean up the E-4 hallway on Family Weekend are now posted at strategic corners of the Observatory to prevent a repetition.

I shake a lot of hands that afternoon and smile so much that my cheek muscles begin to tremble. Dancey steers us through the official program with professional efficiency, but he cannot stem the flow of gossip afterward. I say gossip, but the term disparages the experiences and memories of these women—more than three-quarters of English Lit alumni are in fact alumnae—that span a period of more than forty years. Those who were here five or ten years ago confirm that Nick Hornberger was notorious in their days for his favoritism and his affairs.

“He was in charge of assistantships, scholarships, fellowships—tedious paperwork for his colleagues, so they were happy to leave all that to him,” Annie, class of nineteen ninety-six, remembers. “And boy, did he pick ’em! The fourth floor looked like the catwalk of a beauty pageant!”

“The one good thing you can say about him, he is color-blind.” This information comes from a very attractive African-American woman, who adds hurriedly that her then boyfriend, now husband, was a member of the basketball team, so Hornberger never hit on her. “But I know of several girls who—well, he was charming, so they were rarely offended. I never heard worse of him than that. Flirting, I mean.”

I catch Yvonne’s eyes and I can see what she is thinking, but we had better shut the f*ck up.

A woman whose nametag says Elaine Shaw, ’77, Tulane has been standing in our circle without commenting, and her silence becomes so conspicuous that I apologize to her for talking about a person unknown to her.

“Oh, I know Nick,” she says grimly. “Except he wasn’t called Hornberger then. He took his wife’s name, didn’t you know? Ex-wife’s, now. He was born Nicholas Eagleson.”

This is news to everyone, and Janice, the black woman, wonders what on earth possessed him to change his name from Eagleson to Hornberger.

“You may well ask,” says Elaine.

After an awkward silence, I speak for all of us. “I think we are asking.”

“He raped a girl in my dorm. Nick was on a football scholarship, confident, popular, going places. Mary-Lou was biracial, not conventionally beautiful, but striking—tall, very beautiful hair, and…well, these days it’s called curvaceous. But she never quite found her feet at college; first-generation student, you know how difficult that can be, especially for girls from underprivileged backgrounds. In short, he exploited her vulnerability. Befriended her, helped her with her coursework, that sort of thing. She was flattered, felt she owed him. And don’t forget, this was in the mid-seventies. The world was a little different then. Mary-Lou was persuaded to file charges with the college authorities—” Elaine flushes a little “—which was entirely the right thing to do, politically speaking! Imagine it, one of the first female students of color at Ardrossan, and what happens? She’s raped by a football star!”

“What became of her?” asks Janice.

“The college kept stalling and stalling. They listened to her and they believed her, oh, yes, sir! And then they did nothing. She dropped out after her third year. Started working as a sales assistant somewhere and got married soon after. Then I went to Rice for my doctorate and lost contact with her.”

“Of course there’s no statute of limitations on rape in this state,” Annie says, spelling out what we are all thinking. “If she came forward now—”

I remember Tim’s report of Natalie’s report of an earlier case of sexual assault, but I dismiss it at once. Pillow-talk can be very unguarded, but is it credible that Hornberger told Natalie that he raped a fellow student three decades ago? I don’t think so.





It had been made very clear to us that our attendance at the opening ceremony at the new institute is required. All assistant professors have shown up, and about a quarter of the tenured faculty. Nick Hornberger, who looks older and a little sallow, is not among the triumvirate—this is not, alas, an institute for Literary Studies. But he is a deserving member of the steering committee, and there is no discernible awkwardness at all in the way the other middle-aged, dark-suited men include him in their self-congratulatory circle.

“You know who that is.”

“Some rich guy.” I don’t feel like encouraging Martha Borlind, who has been supplying me with a running commentary on the speakers.

“That’s Natalie Greco’s father. Stepfather, that is.”

Dagnabbit, but that Martha Borlind is sure worth listening to!

“What, the one standing next to Hornberger? The one that looks like Hornberger’s brother?”

Martha and I stare as the two men shake hands and laugh at the remark made by a third.

Innocent till proven guilty, and we wouldn’t have it any other way, would we? Maybe what we just witnessed was an example of consummate professionalism. Nonetheless, it makes me feel sick to my stomach.

About a dozen speeches later we are invited to a buffet lunch, and by a stroke of misfortune I end up waiting in line with Dancey and Dolph, who can hardly bring himself to look at me. Dancey enthuses about the new directions the Arts and Humanities are taking and has several proposals as to how Dolph and I might sub-section our conference.

I inspect the potato salad for evidence of sausage.

“Dolph, what do you think?” I ask conversationally.

He launches into an enthusiastic response. “I think these are all excellent suggestions. If we could position ourselves at the forefront of research aided by the cognitive sciences—”

I cut him short. “Oh, you’re such a creep. Matthew—Professor Dancey, sir, even if the moon turns to cheese, I will not organize a conference about neuroaesthetics. Let me rephrase that. Even when all the little devils put on mittens and shawls because hell has frozen over, I will not organize a conference about neuroaesthetics, with or without young Adolph here. Have I made myself clear?”

Dancey collects himself to speak, but I interrupt him.

“And yes, sir, I do want tenure at Ardrossan. But I will not organize—see above. And now we can all be very calm in our minds and concentrate on our food.”

After this reckless but gratifying stand against bullies and hypocrites, my Homecoming Saturday continues somewhat adversely. Yvonne and I have just taken position on the Observatory garden wall to watch the Homecoming Parade when I feel that tell-tale tightening in my stomach and a vaguely painful pressure in my lower back. Four days early! Must be all that adrenaline. This is how Ardrossan messes with my body.

“Sorry, Yvonne, I forgot something upstairs. Back in a sec!”

If I don’t take that first ibuprofen quickly, it will be too late and I’ll be doubled up with pain for hours. I enter by the side entrance to Modern Languages and take their elevator up. The last time I saw the fourth-floor corridor so deserted was the night I overheard Selena and her lover in the dome. Of course this, too, is a moment convenient for an illicit rendezvous, with everyone out on the streets for the Parade. I am wearing soft-soled boots, so I am not very noisy, but I tread even more carefully and listen up the spiral stairs opposite my office. Take a few steps up, listen again. Nothing. And besides, do I want to know? As if I didn’t know way too much already about way too many people in this department. When all I wanted was to sit in my neat little office and write lots of articles about early modern English literature.

“What the—”

My office door springs open the moment I push my key into the lock. Crouching in front of the locked drawer in my desk is Nick Hornberger. With a screwdriver in his hand.

“You?” My first impulse is anger at this constant intrusion into my space, but when he gets up—two dusty patches on the knees of his suit—he is a big, heavy man with a pointy metal object in his hand. Anger is not my main response any more. I back out through the door.

“Anna.” He follows me. “Don’t overreact, okay?”

“What are you looking for in my office?” I yell at him, still retreating. “What the f*ck do you think I am hiding in my office? What have I to do with your—f*cking mess?”

“Will you stop shouting, you little bitch!” he snarls at me.

“You must be crazy to come up here—did you have the lock on my door changed? And was it you all the time, with the oil and the fish?”

“The oil and the fish? What, are you—you’re raving, woman! And be quiet! Be quiet!”

His voice is much louder than mine, which somewhat undermines his command, but I am not about to start arguing with a cornered, desperate man twice my size. At this point, I am ready to believe him capable of anything.

“Look, I understand you’re shocked.” He makes an effort at controlling himself. “You don’t understand what is really going on—how could you? You know nothing about us here at Ardrossan. So be a good girl, hand me your keys, and stand over there by the window.”

I throw him my keys and retreat to the window in the corridor, watching him.

“We talked about you yesterday.”

“At the reception? I’m not surprised.” He fiddles with my keys; it is the smallest of six. “It’s quite a fantasy, isn’t it? I bet those dried-up alumnae pretend to be all aghast. Nick Hornberger, the rapist professor. They wish.”

My blood runs cold at this blatant brutality. Maybe he knows he is finished, maybe he knows this time he has gambled too high and lost. I really don’t know what my evil angel thinks he is doing when he whacks his spurs into my flesh.

“Nick Eagleson, the rapist football player, actually.”

The effect is all I could have hoped for. Like Lot’s wife looking back at Sodom, he seems to turn into a pillar of salt.

“So you did find it.” He stands up slowly and leans against the back wall. He is huge in the small space of my office and in the gray afternoon light. His eyes focus on me through the doorway. “Where is it? Why haven’t you handed it over?”

“Handed what over? What are you talking about?”

We both realize in the same instant that he has said too much and betrayed himself. A strange movement runs through his body, and although I can’t consciously decode it, it activates my flight instinct. On a very short distance, I have a chance.

I bolt, darting along the corridor toward the staircase, never bothering to look back. “Help! Security! Up here! Security!”

In the great hall I find them, four watchmen standing at a bar table drinking left-over coffee. It strikes me that if I shriek at them to do their damn job and catch the intruder on the fourth floor, and they rush up there and intercept Professor Nick Hornberger, I’ll have a great deal of explaining to do. Have I thought that through? His word against mine?

Suddenly there is a shout behind me, from the second-floor landing.

“Guys? Guys, up here, quick!”

They charge past me and I follow them, but instead of running up the stairs, they turn off into the professors’ hallway. It is full of security men and the half-light of an over-cast late October afternoon, so I hear before I see.

“Shit!” one of them shouts and kicks something along the floor. It is an empty can of spray paint. Its content—red, again—is on the walls around Hornberger’s office door in the form of stenciled poems:

THE WHOLE MOON TURNED BLOOD RED,

AND THE STARS IN THE SKY FELL TO EARTH

AS FIGS DROP FROM A FIG TREE WHEN SHAKEN

BY A STRONG WIND.

“He’ll be writing a feckin’ novel next,” says Rich Westley, whose door is two along from Hornberger’s.

“Sir, did you hear nothing?” The security chief is torn between embarrassment at his team’s incompetence and impatience at Westley’s vagueness.

“Sorry, no—sleeping off the effect of too much lunch at the new Institute for Clap-and-Trap.”

I catch a strong whiff of his liquid lunch, but no other olfactory disturbances. Unless—

My office door is closed but unlocked; the bunch of keys lies on the desk. The drawer is hanging open, but since there was nothing in it, nothing is missing. I grab an ibuprofen, swallow it with one gulp from the water fountain, and send Tim a text.

Wanna see some more graffiti? E-1.

When I get downstairs again, Tim is already there, and he has brought Bernie Cogan.

“Hi, honey. We met at the Parade, and Tim thought since I’ll hear about it in the Hearing Panel anyway, I might as well see it, too. Never a dull moment, huh?”

“You can say that again.”

“And this happened just now?”

“Was discovered just now, anyway. What do you think?”

We survey the blocks of stenciled lines.

“What’s your first impression, both of you?” Bernie asks matter-of-factly, and this is a side I have not yet seen of him.

“Red,” Tim says.

“Love,” I say. “It’s a labor of love. Cutting out—oh, look, there it is!” One of the security men has found the stencil, an extra-large sheet of carton. “Look at those letters. This must have taken forever. This is different than the hate graffiti on the fourth floor.”

“Love and hatred require equal amounts of energy,” Bernie says. “What else?”

“It’s about sex,” I say slowly. “Upstairs was about hate and sex; this is about love and sex. It’s about a girl losing her virginity.”

Rich, Tim, Bernie, and two security men stare at me.

“Trust me, boys. I’m a girl, and I read poetry.”





“Who is your favorite?” Giles asks later that day when I find him in the statue garden, where he is apparently listening in on the concert in the nearby amphitheater. He has a glass of wine, a small bowl of cheese crackers, and an apple with him—“My supper!”—and I can’t believe that he is alone and that he seems pleased to see me.

“Hermes.” I don’t need to think about that answer. “I like that he is the god of travelers, thieves, liars, and poets. I also like that he isn’t quite as brawny as the other male gods.”

Giles turns his head to look at me and smiles.

I am very happy I found him.

“How did you like your first Ardrossan Homecoming?” he asks. “Did it have enough pomp and circumstance for your taste?”

I haven’t often seen him in a chatty mood, and as the muscles in my stomach relax, I wish I could just snuggle up to him and chat the evening away. It’s grown chilly and the sun is beginning to set.

“My taste doesn’t much run to pomp and circumstance. Mind you, Ardrossan’s foolish, fairy-tale Gothicism is a much less daunting backdrop to processions and trumpets and flags than the neo-classical grandeur of the Morningside Heights campus. That always gave me the creeps, to be honest.”

He gazes at me as if he wanted to comment on that, then he offers me a cheese cracker.

“Two different people, then,” he says when I have told him about the new graffiti. “Corvin, or maybe that Harrison girl, threw fish at your door, and someone else writes graffiti about Natalie Greco and Nick Hornberger.”

“But this is about first-time sex, don’t you agree?” I unfold the piece of paper on which I copied the verse.

“Without a doubt.”

“It isn’t really, of course. It’s from the Bible, like the other one. Revelation, this time. Don’t know whether that is significant. Anyway, so much for your theory that Natalie herself is the graffiti artist. She would hardly produce such a labor of love for a man she has reported for sexual assault, and apparently her mother and her step-brother testify to the fact that she was at home with them all day.”

“It was a good theory.” He shrugs and offers me another cracker.

“Thanks. By the way, I saw Natalie’s stepfather at the opening ceremony of the new institute. His bank is one of the sponsors. He shook Hornberger’s hand! Can you imagine that?”

“Wine?” Giles isn’t interested in Nick Hornberger. He is offering me his glass, and I can see that he is shy about it, which in turn rouses my maternal instincts. Amongst others. If I kissed him now, the tangy aroma of the wine would be on both our lips and tongues.

“Oh, and the other mind-blowingly surreal thing that happened today: I caught Hornberger going through my desk! No idea where he got the key to my office, but he has one. So it probably wasn’t Corvin who broke in before, but Hornberger!”

Now he is interested. More, even, than in coming on to me.

“Did he threaten you?”

“Um…obliquely, I’d say. I didn’t know what he was looking for, still don’t, but he didn’t believe that. But one of the alums at the reception, I think she’s a professor at Tulane, told us that he raped someone, a friend of hers, when he was a student here. Allegedly raped someone,” I correct myself.

Giles gazes at me, waiting. His eyes are very bright and warm.

“What? What?” I nudge him.

“Do you really not know what he was looking for?”

“No! Something to do with the allegations, but—”

“I thought we’d found it. Tessa found it. And it was in your office.”

All I can remember when I think back to that day is Giles in his white shirt, and his shirtsleeves, and how he stumbled when—

“The folder. God! I’m thicker than shit in the neck of a bottle!”

Giles laughs. “Yes—the folder. The file that went missing when Nick was hired. DeGroot was held responsible, because he was Dean of Studies back in the seventies and had done his utmost to sweep the case under the rug. It explains why Nick was dead against the idea of a Homecoming reception at the English department. But Ruffin and a few others carried it; they may not even know why Homecoming is Nick’s most hated event in the calendar. Too many ghosts!”

“And the allegation? Did he really rape the girl back then?”

Giles shrugs and offers me the glass again; I shake my head.

“No idea,” he says. “His case isn’t in the file. Corvin must have taken it out, maybe taken it home. If you want to know what I think—”

“I do.”

“I think he did it. Then and now.”

“You have reason to think badly of him.”

“Badly, but not the worst. He didn’t hold a knife to Amanda’s throat.” Giles’s jaw clenches and relaxes. “Hornberger gets off on bending people to his will, but brute force isn’t the kind of triumph he wants. I’m sure he calls it seduction, but he messes with their heads. It’s part of his fun that the women afterward hate themselves even more than they hate him. I’m sure he hates women.”

He inhales as if he had a load of boulders on his chest. Who knows what scenes were played in the affaire Saunders-Hornberger-Cleveland. If Giles was a friend of mine, I would advise him not to tell his colleagues about Amanda and Hornberger. What purpose could it possibly serve? Dancey has the chair between his teeth now and won’t let go. Giles can take over from him when Horny Horn has had his horns clipped.

“Not Hornberger!” I exclaim, jumping with the sudden recollection. “Giles, where’s the file?”

“Why? What is it?”

“You do know he wasn’t called Hornberger then, don’t you?”

He stares at me, very still. Giles becomes very still when he is startled. “What can you mean?”

“He took his wife’s name when he married! He was called Eagleson! Is there a Nicholas Eagleson’s case in the file?”

Giles is still staring, thinking fast. “I only checked for Hornberger.”

“Well, come on then!” I draw him up by his hand—surely in an emergency, innocent physical contact is allowed?—and to my surprise he holds on to it.

“I don’t want you involved in this,” he says.

“I am involved! He rifled my desk for it!”

“That’s incidental.”

“Giles!” I fairly shout at him, all excited and impatient to have at least one of my Ardrossan mysteries solved.

“It’s no use yelling at me. Do what you like when you’re tenured, but for the next five years you must be as untainted by scandal as a newly hatched spring chicken!”

The implications of this harsh statement hit me as if one of the stone statues had been knocked against the back of my head. But this is a piece of his mind that I will have to chew in private, and not in the middle of the garden, in the middle of campus, still holding hands with him, for Chrissakes!

“Be that as it may,” I say, pulling my hand from his clasp. “I must know about the file! Is it in your office?”

“No,” he says mechanically, but he is in as much of a hurry to get back to the Observatory as I am.

“Hey, sir, you’re going in the wrong direction!” some students shout across at us. We are swimming against the current because everyone is now streaming toward the stadium for the evening game.

I am almost running now to keep up with his long strides.

“Anna, go and powder your nose!” he says curtly when we have reached the first-floor hallway.

“Unfair!”

“Boo-hoo. That’s tenure track for you.” He pushes his hands into his jacket pockets for his keys. “Off you run. Will you be at the—and you needn’t make Bambi eyes at me, Miss Lieberman! I’m immune to ’em! Well,” he corrects himself punctiliously, “maybe that’s overstating the case. But I don’t hold with corrupting vulnerable young women, and I won’t let you read that file. Stop that!”

He turns away from me, and I can see his ears have gone red. I only did as he said—opened my eyes at him, fluttered my lashes, pushed out my lower lip, and pouted.

“What if I sit across the room from you, and you just tell me whether it’s there or not?”

This makes him laugh, but he is still barring my way into his office. Just as well that the hallway is empty and nobody can see our ridiculous mating dance. Non-mating dance.

“What if I sit across the room, with my face against the wall and my eyes closed?”

“Anna—”

“If I touch you, you can scream,” I challenge him quietly.

Our knees almost do touch as we sit at his low sofa table perusing the file that records the alleged sexual assault of one Nicholas George Eagleson upon one Mary-Lou Tandy. The scenario, it seems, was humdrum. A dorm party, drugs and alcohol, the assumption of implied assent on the part of the male. What makes this worth breaking into offices for is the eye-witness and ear-witness reports that—if genuine and accurate—seem to leave no doubt that Mary-Lou resisted him and that she had severe bruising on her arms and the inside of her thighs afterward.

“‘They always say no. They have to, because of their reputation. If they let you feel them up, it is okay to go ahead anyway.’”

Giles looks up from the sheet he is reading, the vertical groove between his eyebrows deep and angry. “What?”

“Said one Tommy-Lee Konig, twenty-one, student of geography.”

“It’s incredible that this was kept inside the college.” He surveys the evidence. “It’s as conclusive as it can be, short of a video film. He would almost certainly have been convicted.”

“Would be convicted, you mean,” I correct him. “This would still stand up in court, in this state. It wouldn’t in New York, you see.”

Giles sneers in triumph, and for a moment I can see how much he truly hates Hornberger.

“‘And that’s what I love about the Soooouth…’”