Heidi Julavits: The Vanishers

Madame Ackermann observed a firm boundary between her academic and personal lives, Miranda said, removing her pearls halfway, wedging them now into the recession above her chin.

She was not the kind of professor, Miranda cautioned, straining her necklace’s string with her lower jaw until it threatened to snap, to invite an initiate to her house for a social occasion, not even as a volunteer passer of hors d’oeuvres.

Miranda’s jealousy was understandable. Madame Ackermann’s attentions were the prize over which we initiates competed, the reason we’d come to the Workshop — to study with her, hopefully, yes, but in more pitiable terms to partake of her forbidding, imperial aura by walking behind her on the many footpaths that vivisectioned the campus quad into slivers of mud or grass or snow.

Thus, I reassured Miranda (who, despite the year she’d spent as her stenographer, clearly did not know Madame Ackermann), one of the many admirable qualities Madame Ackermann possessed was that, even as a relentless investigator of past lives, she could permit bygones to be bygones. Yes, she’d selected me, from a pool of thirty-five initiates, to be her stenographer, and yes we’d both immediately come to regret this choice of hers. But after weeks of misunderstandings, deceptions, and hostilities between us, Madame Ackermann was not above extending an olive branch.

And so on the night of October 25 I donned my silver boots and, awash in optimism and specialness, drove to Madame Ackermann’s A-frame. As I passed the custodian-lit Workshop buildings, their windows flickering behind the spruces, I allowed myself to view the scene from the future perspective of an older self, wrought by nostalgia for this place I’d yet to leave or miss. In order to prolong my anticipation of what was sure to be a momentous evening, I took the scenic way along the Connecticut River; in the moonlight, the water, whisked to a sharp chop by the wind, appeared seized into a treacherous hoar of ice. I spied a hunter emerging from an old barn whom I mistook, for the shadowy half second before my car beams illuminated him, to be wearing the decapitated head of a deer. A bat died against my windshield. And yet despite these dark portents I somehow failed to divine, as I turned off the river road and began the slow ascent to Madame Ackermann’s A-frame, that I would never drive along this river again. Or that I would drive along this river again, yes, but I would no longer be the sort of person who wore silver boots to parties and believed that bygones could be bygones.

Madame Ackermann greeted me at the door, eyes starfished by mascara, hair a slab of polished obsidian against the puffball white of her sweater, and dropped my birthday present — a warm bottle of Tokay — on a credenza beside the pile of regifted chutneys and spice rubs from her colleagues. Then she led me to her great room, an inverted-V-shaped atrium lined with bookshelves (the books secured by a series of crisscrossing bungee cords), packed with her friends and coworkers, the majority of them men.

In retrospect: I should have found it odd, given she’d presumably forgiven me, that she should refuse to meet my gaze, that she should take the first available opportunity to slough me onto the other guests.

“You know Julia,” she said, shoving me into a trio of professors, all of whom, though I’d studied with each at one point or another, regarded me blankly. “She’s my archivist.”

The trio (Professors Blake, Janklow, and Penry) resumed their discussion of the death of a Workshop professor named Gerald, their eyebrow hairs antenna-like as they derisively extolled Gerald’s virtues.

“Archivist,” Professor Blake said to me. He pronounced archivist with a judgmental inflection.

“Stenographer,” I clarified, “is the original service she hired me to perform.”

I did not mention the word demotion. I’d been hired as her stenographer, true, but I’d recently been demoted to the position of archivist.

I glanced at Madame Ackermann to see if she’d heard me; I didn’t want to appear to be contradicting her in public, especially now that our relationship was presumably on the mend. She was preoccupied, fortunately, by the sight of Professor Elkin huddling with Professor Yuen behind a kentia palm. Professor Yuen wore her hair in two long braids that narrowed to tips like floppy knives; she spoke to Professor Elkin about a topic that required her to bullet-point the air with an index finger, no doubt something to do with the recent dissolving of the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research laboratory, and whether its failure sounded a death knell for the Workshop’s future prospects as well.

“Ah,” said Professor Janklow. “Stenographer.” He held between his thumb and forefinger a half-eaten shrimp. He eyed the goblet of cocktail sauce on the table beside him, clearly wondering if he could dip his shrimp a second time without being spotted, or calculating the amount of time one must wait to ensure that the same-shrimp dips are no longer seen as consecutive acts, but as two unique events.

“Samuel Beckett was James Joyce’s stenographer,” I said.

“Secretary,” said Professor Janklow.

“Did you ever study with Gerald?” asked Professor Blake. “Before he died, I mean?”

“In fact that’s a myth about Beckett,” said Professor Penry.

“Couldn’t make a martini to save his life,” said Professor Janklow. “Gerald wasn’t a fellow who could grasp the subtler requests such as whisper of vermouth .”

“Poor Gerald,” said Madame Ackermann, returning to our fold. I suspected it from her insincere tone: she had slept with the man.

“You, however,” said Professor Janklow, presenting his empty martini glass to Madame Ackermann, “are all subtlety and whispers.”

Madame Ackermann twisted downward on her sweater’s cowl neck to reveal a turquoise filament of bra and a décolletage dotted by pale moles. This gesture was meant to suggest that she was embarrassed by the compliment, while also suggesting that she was not remotely embarrassed by it. No one, least of all me, would deny that Madame Ackermann, even at the dawn of forty-three, was a bewitching, pixie creature, girlish the term most often used to describe her mixture of naïveté and wiliness, her middle-parted night hair and Eva Hesse Bavarian élan, her habit, during class, of placing one foot on her chair and resting her chin atop a corduroyed knee. She’d preserved her body, or so it seemed, through sheer force of mind. The suppleness of her gray matter — I’m ashamed to admit that I’d imagined how it would feel to the touch — was reflected in the pearly suppleness of her eyes, her hair, her skin.

We were all of us — the female initiates more than the male ones — in some form of love with her. (The fact that Madame Ackermann so closely resembled my dead mother did not render my obsession with the woman any less complicated.)

And thus we tried, as girls in confused love with women will do, in every superficial way to mimic her. We were rapt apprentices of the twisted cowl neck, the peevish cuticle nibble, the messy, pencil-stabbed chignon. We purchased cardigans in yellowed greens and tarry mascaras, we blended our own teas and sewed them into tiny muslin bags that we steeped in chunky mugs and carried with us to class, our socked feet sliding, like hers, atop the wooden platforms of our Dr. Scholl’s sandals. We also slept around. We slept with everyone, but only once. We were, we told ourselves in moments when we felt most pathetic and unmoored, not just imitating Madame Ackermann, we were embracing the culture of the Workshop — the disloyalty, the distrust, the refusal to be known for fear of what people might actually come to know about you.