Alison Lurie - Truth and Consequences

“Even worse. She could stab us with a goose feather. She could tell the world how cold and uptight and full of regulations we are. When she was suffering we wouldn’t even let her lie down.” Bill looked at Jane. “I’m surprised you should even think of trying to take a sofa away from someone like Delia Delaney. You’re an experienced administrator, and she’s this year’s star.”

“I suppose you’re right. But she gets my goat sometimes.”

“Your goat?” Bill smiled. “That’s an odd phrase. You don’t have a goat, do you?”

“Nobody has a goat,” Jane said impatiently.

“Well, not many people at the University do, I expect. But all the same, why a goat?”

“I have no idea,” Jane said. She was used to Bill Laird’s fascination with language, but did not share it. “But you know, sometimes I wonder how long I can bear this job.”

“Come on. You know you love it, really.”

“Well. I suppose so. At least I used to. But this year—”

“Think of it this way. Every autumn fate brings the Center a new collection of entertaining characters, and then, before we can get tired of them, it takes them away.”

“Except I’m already tired of one of them,” Jane said. “You know, usually I like all the Fellows. But there’s something about Delia—I don’t know how to describe it—It’s not as if she’s pretending to be someone she isn’t, like that professor who came to the Linguistics conference last year, who said he’d graduated from Oxford and had published two books that didn’t exist. With Delia, it’s like she’s pretending all the time to be who she is.” Jane sighed.

“I know what you mean. But that’s part of what makes her interesting, you know. Delia’s a phenomenon. Great beauty and great egotism—that’s a winning combination. And that wonderful mezzo Southern voice. I can’t decide who it is she reminds me of—it’s not Joan Sutherland, in spite of the height and the hair.” Every other year, Bill gave a famous lecture course on the opera. “Is it Cecelia Bartoli?”

Jane, who had never heard this name, shrugged.

“She’s a real diva, though. I haven’t seen anything like that close up for years. I expect a lot of people will fall madly in love with her.”

“Are you going to fall madly in love with her?”

“Heavens, no.” Bill laughed. “But I admit I’m intrigued. It’ll be fun to watch her in action. I wish I could have been there when she got them to move the sofa.”

“I don’t think it’ll be fun for me,” Jane said, giving up on her sandwich and pushing it aside.

“Well, maybe not,” Bill admitted. “But never mind, she won’t be here long.”

“She’ll be here until the end of next May,” Jane sighed.

“I don’t think so.”

“But she has to be. She signed the contract, like all the other Fellows.”

“I doubt she’ll stay the course,” Bill said. “The Corinth winter will drive her away if nothing else does. She’s a summer creature, you can see that by looking at her. Like me. The minute the first flakes fall I want to be in Key West.”

“You really think she’d walk out on the Center?”

“I’d bet on it. Would you like a little dessert?”

“No thanks.” Jane smiled, hoping Bill was right, then frowned. “But if she does go, what will we do?”

“Oh, we’ll sigh with regret, and with relief, and plow the rest of her stipend back into the endowment, and buy you a new top-of-the-line copier.”

“That’d be nice.” For the first time that day, Jane laughed spontaneously.

“Any other problems?”

“No; everything looks good. Even Susie seems happy: she’s not so lonely now that the Fellows are there.”

Back at the Center, Susie, wearing a white T-shirt and tight pink cotton slacks—too tight, in Jane’s opinion—was reading People magazine.

“Hi,” she said. Then, lowering her voice and gesturing with her head toward what had once been the long drawing room of the mansion—it still contained its original Victorian furniture and pictures, but was now called the Emerson Room and used for lectures and receptions—“Mrs. U is here.”

“I’ll go speak to her,” Jane said with a certain amount of apprehension. Lily Unger, the widow of the man after whom the Unger Center was named, was not only still alive but often in evidence. Though it had been six years since her husband died, and four since she and her three Persian cats had moved into the former carriage house, she still apparently considered the main building her property. When she was in town, she often wandered over to “see what is going on,” as she put it. Without calling ahead to announce a visit, she would tour the rooms downstairs, and any upstairs office whose door was open. In the past, this had caused problems. “I looked up from the computer, and there was this little old lady in a hat standing in the middle of the room. She’d walked right in, as if it was her own house,” one Fellow had protested last year. “Well, it was her own house for fifty years,” Jane had told him.

If Mrs. Unger had nothing better to do on Tuesday afternoons she often attended the Fellows’ lectures, and if they displeased her, she complained. “I don’t think Matthew would have cared for that,” was a frequent comment. Jane never answered back. It was necessary to treat Mrs. Unger with great courtesy, since she still owned two-thirds of her husband’s former property, more than an acre of lawn and garden only two blocks from campus. There was almost no department at Corinth University that did not want to get its hands on this land, the carriage house, and the financial portfolio that Lily Unger, who had no children, had inherited.

Mrs. Unger, who unlike her husband was nobody’s fool, had remained cool to the many chairmen and deans who had urged her to make them a gift of her property and move into an assisted living facility, and she was even more scornful of the people from the Development Office.

“They must think I’m going soft in the head,” she had once remarked to Jane, to whom, perhaps as a fellow townie, she had taken a liking. “I know perfectly well that as long as I own the property the University will be nice to me. But once I sign it over to them, it’s finished. Poor old Nat Greene, I warned him, hold on to those fields out by the University orchards if you want to keep their respect and your parking permit, but he didn’t listen to me. He gave them the land and they gave him the ceremonial dinner, and the brass plaque, and a lot of pretty thank-you letters on thick cream-colored embossed paper from everyone in Knight Hall, and then they forgot about him, more or less.

“I’ve made my will,” she had added, “but don’t you tell anyone that, Janey. I want to keep them guessing. That makes it more fun. I want them to think I could change my mind anytime. I could leave the property to the Metropolitan Opera or the Republican Party or a home for orphan cats. Last time I saw that smarmy young woman from Development, at a concert in Bailey Hall it was, I couldn’t stop myself from telling her how I’d been thinking that something should be done for all those AIDS orphans in Africa. She practically turned green.”

“Oh, I see the new letterhead has come.” Jane indicated a stack of boxes on Susie’s desk. “If you’re not busy, you might distribute some to all the Fellows.”

“Okay.” Susie rose without complaint and left the office. Though incapable of initiative, she was always accommodating.

For a moment, Jane sat on, gathering her resources; then she headed for the Emerson Room.

“Oh, hello there, Janey,” Lily Unger said. She was a small, plump elderly woman with curly white hair and big brown eyes, wearing a flowered silk dress, matching pumps, and an interfering expression. “What on earth has happened to the other red sofa?”