Serpentine, Volume 4, Number 2, Spring 2000

The Educating of Penelope Malleable

by Lynn Veach Sadler

       She couldn't avoid taking a class with Dr. Foul-Mouth Sharp-Nose. He was teaching the first half of the British Novel the only semester she could fit it in, the first of her senior year. Why him? He was a Pound specialist. A pound-of-flesh man, from what she’d heard.

       She sat a little less than half way from the front, listened intently, took such notes as could be taken in his class, and played her standard game of doodling. Doodles increased her powers of concentration. Mostly, she weighed Professor Sharp-Nose in the balances and found him wanting. He winged his "lectures" with calculated irony. While the guys guffawed and other girls tittered, Penelope met his witticisms with a polite and disengaged smile but was smart enough to stay hidden from his view behind the nubiles on the front rows.

       A stalker-bobber, Sharp-Nose would suddenly plunge down the center aisle or dart around the students at the sides of the room, halt abruptly before a startled Joe College, jab the "Dismal Digit" at him, and demand, "How many bastards did Moll Flanders have?" Penelope, sitting safely in the middle of the row, thought it all too obviously Freudian not to be discounted out of hand, but she kept her pun to herself. Joe gurgled inarticulately while Sharp-Nose exclaimed, "Ah ha!" The class never learned just how many bastards Moll Flanders had.

       Sharp-Nose called roll. "And how is Miss Malleable today? None of those women's disorders plaguing you, my dear, I trust? Good." Or, "Ah, here's Miss Malleable. Will we, class, benefit from her wisdom today, do you think?" Or, "Now, class, our next member is Miss Malleable, Miss Penelope Malleable. Is she really Amelia Sedley, or could there possibly be lurking under that gentle exterior a Becky Sharp? Will we find out, or is that treat reserved for someone more special?"

       Penelope cringed inside and learned to harden herself before entering his classroom. As Sharp-Nose moved down the roll, her lips would become more tightly compressed. After the ordeal was over, she’d try to hide the wet spots her hands had left on the desk or her notebook. If the harangue were particularly virulent, she bit her lower lip, once until the blood oozed.

       Sharp-Nose found another way to work around her denying him physical access. He would make his usual sallies down the middle aisle or along the sides of the room, select his target, point at him, whirl and focus that finger instead toward Penelope. "Well, Miss Malleable, and what do you have to say to that? Why was Alec D'Urbervilles so easily able to overcome the timorosities of Tess Durbeyfield? Why, Miss Malleable? I'm waiting, Miss Malleable. Why?"

       To the relief of the class, who sensed that this hounding was beyond his normal, Penelope always managed to muster some kind of answer, nothing profound very often, but any answer was a victory. Sharp-Nose was known for picking on the timorous, but most were there in the first place to be picked on or to watch others being picked on. But now he seemed obsessed with cracking Penelope Malleable. Did he know he was "obsessed"? That was the debate racing across the campus. Most students thought he knew and that his knowing was Penelope's terrible adversary. "Well, Miss Malleable, that answer just goes to show how very, very inexperienced you are. You remind me of C. S. Lewis’s Perelandra, you do, Miss Malleable. I put it to you now. Think, Miss Malleable, Miss Penelope Malleable, wouldn't any woman under the right conditions succumb to the advances of the proper man? Any woman, Miss Malleable?"

       Penelope made the mistake of besting Sharp-Nose, though inadvertently, before the class. She had a good memory, and, occasionally, a page number, picture, or quotation would rise before her. One day he asked her about the touted sexual prowess of Tom Jones. She interrupted him with, "Yes, I'm sure your hypothesis is tenable, but I seem to recall that, on page 175, Fielding suggests . . . ." She had read the passage to her roommate Nell the previous evening, and it had triggered a long discussion. The class, at first dumbstruck, began to laugh and applaud but quickly came to attention when Penelope coolly opened her book to the famous page and said, "And I quote . . . ." By the time she'd finished, everyone in the class, with the possible exception of Sharp-Nose, hanging on her words, the period was over. Sharp-Nose failed to give his usual "Class dismissed," so, when silence met the end of her recitation, Penelope glanced at her watch, packed up her belongings, and moved quietly toward the door. The other students followed. In the hall, she was the center of a laughing, jubilant circle patting her on the back. Sharp-Nose watched in the background.

       Next class, on Sharp-Nose’s desk was a beautiful, obviously expensive crystal bud vase with a single salmon-colored rose. He called the roll; didn’t single out Penelope; didn’t stalk, lunge, or point; delivered an analytical, polished lecture from behind his desk with dignity. The students glanced at one another, at Penelope, and at Sharp-Nose. Penelope studied her notebook, but she was scared.

       As he was delivering his last sentence, Sharp-Nose carefully picked up the vase and moved to the back of the room. He stationed himself by the door and, when he had finished his peroration, said quietly, "Class dismissed." Equally subdued, the students prepared to leave. Penelope tried to gauge it so that she could escape in the crowd, but he gently said, as her companions started to whirl her through the door, "Miss Malleable, I'd like to see you for a moment, please." He paused; the curious students unfroze and moved slowly on. But he made sure that there was still an audience and that his words were not so muted as to be inaudible to that audience. "I wanted to apologize for my crass behavior to you these last weeks. It is inexcusable. Please accept this"—he extended the vase—"not only as an act of contrition but in acknowledgement that you are rare like this flower and its setting." He seemed to be choked up at this juncture but pulled himself, visibly, together. He removed the books from Penelope's arms, placed them on a desk close by, then pulled one of her hands forward, all very ceremoniously, pressed the vase in it, brought up her other hand and placed it also on the vase and over the fingers of the hand he had made encircle it already. For a long moment, he held both of his hands over hers around the vase and looked her straight in the eye. Then he abruptly shook himself, sighed audibly, and walked out the door without a backward glance. Penelope felt wobbly and sat down by her books while the last of the students followed in his wake. A few stuck their heads in from the hall to find out what the hell was going on.

       Gradually, in the remaining weeks of the course, Sharp-Nose lightened a little, and a pleasant laughter infused the classroom. He asked Penelope a question or two directly, but with never the slightest hint of difference from the other students in the way he approached her. He ceased to be, in that class at least, so maniacal about sex and scatology. In fact, Penelope sometimes had the strange feeling she'd wandered into someone else’s class by mistake.

       The other students quickly forgot the earlier weirdness and felt cheated. They'd come to Foul-Mouth’s class for a sideshow and now had the ladies' sewing circle. They began to harbor a vague sense of resentment toward Penelope for having caused the metamorphosis in the most-talked-about professor on campus. He wasn't even foul-mouthed any longer.

       Sharp-Nose brooded. He invaded the English Department files to find out about Penelope Malleable. He memorized her class schedule and began to arrange to meet her accidentally on campus. At first, he'd merely look up suddenly as he was about to pass her, break into a warm smile of recognition, then freeze that smile, as if in response to a sudden terrible realization, sadly cut off the frozen smile entirely, stop a sad shaking of his head in mid-course, look down, drop his shoulders dejectedly, and pass on. His next tactic was to stare at her during the English Department lecture series. He'd wait until she'd entered and taken a seat, then find a place where she couldn’t help being aware of his presence. At one lecture, when he was introducing the speaker, he feigned forgetting what he was about and stared at her until people began to try to see who/what had interrupted him.

       At about the same time, Penelope began to receive anonymous letters quoting literary instances of rakes and the women who’d reformed them. She was flattered but disgusted, though she kept the vase on view in her room and had pressed the rose.

       Her roommate Nell, with whom she discussed the misadventure at length, counseled quiescence. "Don't even tell Professor Tall-Man," she urged. "You might get Sharp-Nose in trouble, and we'll be away from here in a few short months for good." She finally succeeded in helping Penelope find some humor in the situation. They'd been to a Lyceum concert attended by Professor and Mrs. Foul-Mouth Sharp-Nose. "If I'd known she was so ugly," Nell had quipped, "I’d have urged you to be nicer to him!"

       Across the aisle, Sharp-Nose, seeing that she was capable of tittering and acting the schoolgirl in his presence, knew the time had come. Her name had arisen in departmental meetings, and he’d learned that Ethereal Tall-Man was her champion. A full professor who could influence tenure decisions, he was certain young Tall-Man wouldn't evade his overtures; and he reasoned that Penelope was too embarrassed to take her little "problem" to Tall-Man in the first place.

       Ethereal and Help-Meet Tall-Man suddenly found themselves being "cultivated" by the Sharp-Noses. Ethereal was aware of Sharp-Nose's reputation and wondered if Meet-Help were the object of this attention; but their marriage, they admitted in talking the situation out, was simply too sound to suffer from any such encroachments. Besides, they weren't so entirely otherworldly as not to worry about his getting tenure. "Lord knows," Meet-Help would occasionally say to Ethereal, "you may be the best teacher in the department, but that won't help you stay here. All the personal interest you show in your students won't help you either. And it just takes away the time you should be using on your dissertation."

       Eventually, Sharp-Nose made the opportunity for Penelope's name to come up, very casually, and confided to Ethereal that he'd like to see her get a fellowship and go on to graduate school. "She seems so shy, though, in my class, that I'm afraid of scaring her off. Do you know anything about her, Ethereal?"

       After Ethereal’s disquisition on Penelope, the two agreed to sound out other professors who could give her influential letters of recommendation. Sharp-Nose mentioned several friends around the country who could pull strings in their respective departments and get her a fellowship.

       "Since you know her so well, Ethereal, why don't you help her get lined up? You might suggest that she talk with those who're writing for her and let them know what she wants to specialize in. She's applying for the Wilson anyway, isn't she?"

       Dutifully, Ethereal called Penelope and talked at length about the how's and wherefore's of preparation for getting accepted into graduate school and getting a fellowship. He told her he'd already spoken with five members of the department, including Professor Sharp-Nose, and that they expected her to contact them.

       In the meantime, Sharp-Nose "happened" to run into Penelope coming out of the library on West Campus. This time he was aggressive: "Look, Girl, I've apologized for my behavior more humbly to you than to anyone else in my whole life. I'm through apologizing. You're the foolish one now. What are you afraid of? Maybe you are a school girl like all the rest."

       Stung, Penelope started to reply, but he quickly brushed past her and went in the library.

       The next day, she was in the carrel assigned to undergraduates writing honors theses and had just started for another book. She turned straight into the chest of Sharp-Nose. They jumped away from each other, and both, unaccountably, began to laugh. They laughed until everybody started peeping out of the carrels at them. Sharp-Nose motioned for her to collect her things. When she had, he took her firmly by the elbow and steered her out of the library.

       "Well, Girl, the least you can do is buy me a drink now that you've totally rousted my dignity." At the rising concern on Penelope's face, he quickly added, "I'll even settle right now for one of those goddamned Southern ‘Cokes’ you people live on! Lead on, Girl!"

       They had a pleasant half-hour or so in the main campus haunt in full view of all passersby. "Girl" became "Penelope," but she didn’t notice. He was solicitous about her future plans and insisted on writing letters for her. He might be able, even, to make a few phone calls on her behalf. He and his "good friend," Ethereal Tall-Man, had had quite a chat, yes, quite a chat about their Miss Malleable. He inquired about whether she was soon to be married or was wise enough to get her graduate work done first and about her progress on her honor's thesis, which, she was surprised to learn, he also knew about. More amazing, he’d always liked John Ford, too, and wasn't sure that, if he had it to do over again, he wouldn't write on that melancholy figure himself, though he wondered why a girl like Penelope would be attracted to such a lugubrious type.

       Reluctantly, Sharp-Nose remembered that he was a busy man, as much as he hated to part from charming company. He promised they would "talk again" some time soon.

       By the end of that first semester of her senior year, Penelope and Sharp-Nose were easy with each other when they met on campus. She’d completed his course with an A and no farther distinguishing treatment. Occasionally, Tall-Man would mention that Foul-Mouth had asked about her, but she began to think she'd embroidered the whole affair. Still, she was cautious and wouldn’t take the second semester of his novel course, though the time slot was free.

       During registration, she was riding the bus over to West Campus when Sharp-Nose got on. She instinctively crouched behind the girls in front of her, but he saw her immediately. He seemed to hesitate—there were plenty of seats available—then started over to her.

       "May I?" he asked, sitting down before she could respond. "How have you been, Penelope? I thought you were going to drop by my office. I want you to see your final exam. I pride myself on still being able to teach you a few things."

       Penelope glanced at him, but he appeared innocent of double-entendre. She chided herself for having become so suspicious.

       "I will, I assume, see you for the second half of the novel. If you haven't bothered to fetch your exam by then, I'll give it to you in class. Well, Girl, where's your tongue today? You use it well enough when you have the right audience! Sorry, I shouldn't have said that. I've had a bad morning, that's all. An article that won't come together, that sort of thing. And I assume you've heard the rumors that my wife and I get along none too well. If only there weren't so many distractions. Life was easier in the Middle Ages."

       Pause. Penelope still silent.

       "I'm sorry, Child. I know you young folks think we old fogies do nothing but complain. ‘Wet black boughs’ and all that sort of thing, eh? ‘Wearing my trousers rolled’? Do you understand at all what I'm talking about, what I'm up against? Things could be easier, Child, for all of us. Would you go out with me sometime?"

       Penelope had been almost mesmerized by his monody, and, while she felt the whiplash of that last, she decided, when he went on as though nothing had changed, that nothing had. "I'm getting loony," she thought.

       "Well, you are in my class this semester, aren't you?" He grabbed her course schedule sticking out of the side compartment of her book bag on the seat between them. "Why not?"

       She lamely tried to explain: her fifteen-hour load plus working on her honors thesis.

       He took stock, calmed down. "You do, I see, have my time slot available. Why not audit the course? You don't know as much as you should about the modern period anyhow, and auditing constitutes the kind of special effort fellowship committees look for. Most of my contacts are with people in my own area of specialization, and I'd at least like to be able to tell them that, unlike so many students, you don't snub your nose at the ‘newer’ literature. How about it?"

       He’d trapped her, cunningly gotten across that his letters of recommendation were dependent upon her auditing English 501.

       Sharp-Nose controlled Penelope's attendance as if he drove her with a whip. She'd expected to get by with putting in an appearance twice a week at most; but, when she'd been absent, he'd taunt and make her conspicuous the way he had at the start of the previous course. On the other hand, if she'd been present at the last meeting, he treated her like the other students. He’d occasionally wait for her at the end of class and chat briefly and nicely but always broke away first and never asked her to go anywhere with him or alluded to her absences or his response. So long as she "behaved," he behaved.

       Fairly soon into the course, he announced that one of the novelists they'd be taking up later was speaking at a neighboring campus and that they were to have a class off in exchange for attending the lecture. He appointed a male student to arrange a car pool and had the departmental secretary type a list of who was to go in what car. The last class before the lecture, he announced that all students would be in attendance or he'd know the reason why in terms of their course grades. He looked menacingly at Penelope. He merely left the list of riders on his desk at the end of class and walked out as the students crowded up to get their copies. As she'd feared, Penelope was assigned to Sharp-Nose's car, which was to pick up its riders the following Friday at 7:15 P.M. at the circle on East Campus. Three other coeds were to ride with him, too, so she wondered why she felt so cold.

       Nell scoffed at her fears. After all, what could happen with five people in a car? And everybody in the class knew about the lecture, and Nell knew where Penelope was going and with whom, and she'd be signed out officially from the dorm with destination and companions. What could possibly happen? He'd have to be crazy to try something. No sweat.

       Penelope sweated, however, from Wednesday to Friday, but found no exit. She knew he wouldn't believe her if she called in sick. Tall-Man had told her often enough about the peccadilloes of Academe. The slightest hint of irregularity or a simple offering up of the kind of praise that damns, and she might not have a chance at a fellowship.

       "Color me stupid," she told herself. "There's nothing so special about my body that would make him endanger his career. I'm not even sure I did hear him ask if he could take me out sometime. I think I must be going crazy. This kind of thing just does not happen. How ridiculous I am."

       She would have sweated more and done something less ridiculous had she known that the other three coeds, none of whom was in her dorm, had notes left at the reception desk for them Friday morning indicating that Professor Sharp-Nose had become ill and was sorry to have to cancel the trip to the lecture.

       Penelope arrived at the traffic circle at 7:12 and waited close to the statue of the university’s great benefactor. In the glow of the safety lamps, he seemed poised for action. Campus legend had it that he always stood when a virgin walked in front of his great stone chair. Why hadn’t he stood for her?

       For some reason, her mind was sliding through the night of the animals' liberation in That Hideous Strength when a brief, soft playing with an automobile horn brought her back. The car was before her, and, as she looked up, the door was opening. She glanced around for the other girls and saw only a campus cop a few feet away, looking at her with what seemed to be a knowing stare. She had to stop to let him pass before she could continue to the car.

       "Where are . . . ?" She was cut off by a rude cacophony of horn from a Thunderbird obviously in no mood to have its race to some jocularity delayed by the Sharp-Nose vehicle.

       "Get in, Girl. We're blocking traffic! I'll circle several times to see if the others are coming."

       There was nothing else to do, so she did what he said, and he reached over her, lingeringly, she felt, to lock her door. They drove the circle several times, as promised, but no one else appeared, and she couldn't see anyone approaching from either side of the quadrangle. It was done.

       They drove in silence for some time, and Penelope felt as though she were being bound and gagged, as if her ears were being stuffed with something. She was absolutely sure she would spend the duration of her life riding with this man by her side, all her senses stifled. She shuddered, felt as though she were choking.

       "You're not feeling well, Childie. Don't worry. You won't have to sit through that lecture. I'll take care of you. Professor Sharp-Nose has always taken care of you. You're Professor Sharp-Nose's prize pupil, but you haven't yet learned all that Professor Sharp-Nose has to teach you. You're stubborn, my dear. And, while that stubbornness is partly responsible for your being bright, it mustn't be used against your mentor. You mustn't ever try to get the best of your mentor, my dear."

       Throughout his chant, Penelope couldn't speak, knew she wouldn't be able to speak. She sensed all her pores dilating as a cold wind rushed against her body, making her clammy. All she could hear, though, was Sharp-Nose's monotonous voice and her own heart beating louder and louder.

       She had no idea where they were or how long they’d been driving when lights suddenly blinded her. He’d pulled in to—she felt her laughter rising—a drive-in! She felt him glance at her and smile. She must be crazy. They were at a drive-in, a "clean, well-lighted place"! God in heaven, she was going mad. He really was solicitous about her condition and was only going to get her a "restorative," as he'd called it.

       The yellow Porsche parked behind the Little Tee in one of the many empty spaces in the dark area of the Passion Pit section. It was too early in the evening for neighbors.

       Penelope was able to answer civilly when he asked what she'd like. They exchanged a few pleasantries while they waited for the curb girl to return with their order, but when she tried to insist that she was well enough to go on to the lecture, that she was just recovering from the flu and was a little weak, he seemed about to revert to the "mentor" role again. She desisted.

       The girl brought her Coke and his coffee and was pleasantly dismissed by Sharp-Nose with a tip that insured against their being disturbed without direct recall. He removed Penelope’s Coke from the tray, leaned toward her, and opened the glove compartment to place it on one of the two circles that Penelope was afraid to take her eyes off of. The hand moved from the cup, and she had to follow it with her eyes, to her left knee. He moved toward her on the seat, and she felt the handle of the door in her right side. The hand felt rough through her hose, and she might have giggled at the thought, only she didn't dare. The hand moved a little higher under her skirt and began a gentle stroking motion just above the knee.

       His litany started again. "You have to understand, Penelope. You are my pupil. You belong to me and know everything you need to know from me. Mine. Mine."

       She ceased to understand as his words began to run together. She was again suspended in time, never to get free except as he willed. She thought about Amarantha in "How Beautiful with Shoes," the story she most remembered from her first college English class and about how silly it had seemed to her then. She thought about the girl in the Flannery O'Connor short story who'd been seduced for her wooden leg. She couldn't will herself to move against the overwhelming pressure of that constant and measured friction on her leg and its relationship to Sharp-Nose's singsong. She thought about how sorry Nell would be for not being brighter about the situation. She thought about Ethereal Tall-Man and hoped he wouldn't be disappointed in her—

       The chains were suddenly broken, and she could move and feel her own senses taking over again. The hand was gone; the voice had stopped. Sharp-Nose's tie was loosened when she turned to look at him back on his side of the car. She realized she'd never seen him askew—what a funny word!—before. His body was pushed down beneath the steering wheel, and his head was thrown back against the seat. His mouth was open, and she mentally recorded the spittle at its corners. He was shaking all over and gasping for breath. His right hand was suspended in the air between them opening and shutting, opening and shutting. She forced herself to look away from it and back at him. What was wrong? A heart attack! He must be having a heart attack. What ought she to do? There was a blanket in the back seat, and she grabbed it and tried to cover him. But he fought it, and she found herself desperate to keep him covered. What if he died? Should she get help? If he were found here, what would people think about her? Maybe she should call an ambulance and then try to get back to campus by herself. But what about her fingerprints? If they suspected someone was with him, they'd check for fingerprints. Oh, how stupid. She wouldn't have any fingerprints on record anywhere, only a footprint on her birth certificate. Let them use that to get her if they could!

       A moan brought her attention back to Sharp-Nose. He seemed to convulse but shuddered less and less until he went still. Penelope thought he was dead and was about to scream when he sat up straight, rubbed a hand over his hair, and straightened his tie. He realized she was staring at him and leered at her.

       "Look's like I was the one who was sick, Girl, but I'm all right now. I'm fine. Haven't felt better in years. You're a pure tonic, you are. I'm the one who needed the restorative, I guess. Hey, I'd better return you to the dorm before somebody misses you."

       Sharp-Nose hummed all the way back and let his Porsche have her way with curves. Penelope sat stunned in her corner and managed to wave back at him as he jauntily took his leave of her when they were again at the traffic circle.

       Penelope didn't tell anyone what had happened, wasn't really sure anything had happened, but she was very much afraid of Sharp-Nose and felt that he had more of a hold over her than a few letters of recommendation to graduate schools. She couldn't get out of her head the absolute finality of his "You belong to me and know everything you need to know from me." She felt that some kind of Plexiglas casing was gradually closing around her whole body. What should she do? What could she do? Thank heavens, Nell was out; Penelope pretended to be asleep when her roommate returned.

       Penelope missed none of Sharp-Nose's classes, and they both acted as if nothing had happened. She was beginning to relax a little, for he in no way made her exceptional in class, and she never seemed to run into him on campus any more, though she was constantly on her guard. Then, when she returned to her dorm one afternoon, she found a message waiting: "Professor Sharp-Nose of the English Department called. He'd like to see you in his office (366 Kallen Bldg.) tomorrow afternoon at 4:30 concerning application forms." The Plexiglas casing snapped shut. Her stomach went lead. She visualized Sharp-Nose smiling to himself as he pulled her toward him by the life-support line connected to her casing. She was floating through space, not hurried, but always inexorably drawn, drawn by the man who stated his possession of her as a fact like any other.

       She walked through the motions of the rest of that day and night waiting for the line to become taut. She had no will to resist HIM but smiled perfunctorily at Nell, who glanced at her sideways occasionally but thought better of commenting.

       At 3:30 the following afternoon, Penelope began to adjust her always-neat side of the room. When she was satisfied that everything was impeccable, she dressed with great care and said goodbye to Nell, who thought she was going to the library. The brusque scraping of the bus doors behind her as she emerged on the sidewalk on West triggered in her mind the image of Sharp-Nose reaching for the coiled line on his desk. He picked it up and suddenly made it pop as he jerked the coil straight and began to pull the line toward him. Penelope looked up at the Gothic towers bending in on the quad, cutting off the light over her head. She hurried from the bus stop, traversed one end and one side of the quad and stopped before Kallen. If the massive doors to the building wouldn't open, what then? She'd be free. But they did open, by themselves, it seemed to her, and the line's forward motion pulled her inside. She slowly climbed the stairs to third floor, wanting to break her rhythm. If she could only turn aside to a bulletin board or the ladies' room or to read a schedule on an office door . . . . But she couldn't. "I went up one flight of stairs. Just like me. I went up another flight of stairs. Just like me. I opened a door. Just like me. I saw a monkey. Just like . . . you!"

       She could feel Sharp-Nose becoming more bent on her now, starting to form fists around the line that pulled her. On the third floor, she thought, "I've always been bad at directions. If I can't find the doorway to the tower, I'll break the LINE. I won't have to go." But, without changing her pace, she walked directly to the door opening to the tower stairs. "Pretend it's Trajan's column. When you get to the top, you’ll see the emperor's ashes in an urn. You’ll look at them and leave."

       Stairs, a level with offices to be passed, more stairs. When she looked up, the walls of the tower also seemed to turn in, but this time, to block her ascent. "If I touch them and they're solid, I can't go on. I'll have to go back." But the line threaded its way up the stairs, making space for her passing. The second level of the tower would have his office.

       She'd been in this tower many times, mostly to Ethereal Tall-Man's office, which was the only other one besides Sharp-Nose's on the tower’s top level.

       Tall-Man's name became a talisman. She stopped before the door opening to the level that housed his office, not just Sharp-Nose's. Tall-Man. Tall-Man. Tall-Man. Suddenly, she remembered a scene in that office from what now seemed a hundred years ago. She was sitting by Ethereal Tall-Man's desk chatting with him. His phone rang, and he turned aside to answer it. She felt someone staring at her. Tall-Man's office mate, Forever Suave, had just dismissed his student conferee and was checking her out. He was quite handsome—tall with prematurely gray hair and a bold and confident nose. What did she know about him? Rumors. Rumors that he'd been reprimanded for dating undergraduates. Now he was interested in her. She watched him pick up a piece of paper from his desk and, without breaking his eye-lock, slowly begin to crumple it in his hand. When it was rolled to his satisfaction, he cast tentatively toward her a couple of times. Tall-Man's wastebasket was beside her chair. She looked at it and looked back at Forever Suave. He arched the paper gently in her direction, and it fell in her lap. What was it Hamlet had said to Ophelia? "Lady, shall I lie in your lap?" Forever Suave looked at the ball of paper in her lap, let his eyes move down her legs, then back up, across the paper, and on upwards. He had just found her eyes again when Tall-Man picked up something from his desk and let it fall with a slight clatter. She hadn't been aware he’d put down the phone. Forever Suave went back to the papers on his desk. Penelope blushed and dropped her eyes before Tall-Man’s quizzical look.

       The line snapped again. She felt herself thrust through into the small alcove outside Sharp-Nose's office to her right and Tall-Man and Forever Suave's office directly in front of her some two feet away. The alcove had no windows; the one overhead light made the place crepuscular. She listened for life behind either door and could hear none. The tower might as well have been soundproof.

       She didn't know how long she'd stood there, but suddenly the door to the office opened, the occupant probably curious about who was in the alcove. She took a step forward and almost fell into Tall-Man’s arms. She motioned toward Sharp-Nose's door, and Ethereal looked at her curiously but let her precede him into his own office, then closed the door.

       "What's wrong?" He'd been somewhat distant since the Forever Suave incident.

       Penelope realized she couldn't tell him about Sharp-Nose. After Forever Suave, he'd probably think it her fault. "Sorry. I didn't mean to be histrionic. I just stupidly ran all the way up the tower stairs and put myself out of breath. No, I don't know why. Kid stuff, I guess. I have an appointment with Dr. Sharp-Nose to talk about my graduate school plans. If you'll be here later, I'd like to talk with you, too." She knew as she grabbed for it that it was no use. He held a study circle at the Newman Center every Thursday afternoon at 5:00. She'd sat in herself on the discussions of Augustine, Aquinas, and Abelard and for the Battle of Universals.

       No, he was sorry, but he was in a hurry. They moved to the door; he followed her out into the alcove. Before they could part formally, however, Sharp-Nose's door opened.

       "Here we are," he cooed. "I knew Miss Malleable wouldn't be late. We can always count on this one, eh, Tall-Man?"

       Penelope wondered trivially whether his unctuousness would continue when they were alone. She was all but oblivious to their exchange of compliments about her.

       "I'll leave you to it." Tall-Man made his least ethereal statement of the decade. "Do it up right."

       Penelope watched the last feeble motion in the door that had swallowed Ethereal Tall-Man.

       Sharp-Nose put an arm around her shoulders, walked Penelope into his office, closed and locked the door. He seated her in a straight chair a little farther from the door than the room's center. He rolled the chair from behind his desk and sat facing her with his back to the door.

       "Now, then, tell me your plans. What do you want to specialize in? Where do you want to go to graduate school? You'll need to know the names of scholars in your chosen area and where they're located when you're interviewed for the Woodrow Wilson. How many languages do you have? You do intend to go on for a doctorate, don't you? I'm wasting my time unless you are. What classes have you had here? What are your weakest areas? Are you making any attempts to strengthen your weak areas? Would you consider staying here for graduate work?"

       Penelope tried but couldn't find her voice. She tried again and knew it was a squeak but struggled on, answering as many of his questions as she could remember. He jotted as she talked. Occasionally, he glanced at her over the top of his glasses but continued to write, pausing to ask for an elaboration or remind her of a question she'd forgotten. At length, he placed his notes in a file folder, and she could see the recommendation forms she’d given him after class one day. He put down his gold Cross pen, closed the file, opened the lower left-hand drawer of his desk and placed it inside. The drawer slid unctuously, gave a bell-like click at coming home. Sharp-Nose looked at Penelope and smiled.

       "Well, my dear, here we are. No more White Rabbit. It's time. My ‘true Penelope was not Flaubert.’ ‘Daphne with her thighs in bark/Stretches toward me her leafy hands.’ I must waken her." He rolled his chair toward Penelope until their knees just touched. "Where is the music of the spheres?" he intoned and seemed to listen, watching her with a hardness in his eyes. "Where is it? I will not have come to this in vain. I will not have." He took Penelope's cold hands and pried each finger loose from its neighbor, then pressed the hands together into the attitude of prayer and began to rub them briskly. When they were warmer, he took each finger in turn, kissed its nail, and slid it ever so gently into his mouth until his lips reached her knuckles. He gently replaced her hands in her lap, stood bent over her, brushed back her bangs, and kissed her forehead. He closed her eyes with his index finger, traced their lashes, then kissed each eye in turn. Penelope was somnambulant. He opened the lower right-hand desk drawer and brought out a woman's hairbrush with a pewter handle. He rolled his chair now alongside Penelope's, swiveled his body toward her, and slowly began to brush her hair, transcribing a circle about her in his chair as he brushed the left side, then the back, then the right. He put away the brush; they both listened to the swishing drawer, its bell-like click. He stood before Penelope, looking down at her, then knelt in front of her. Slowly he began to trace a cross on her chest. First the upright from just above her navel to her neck. Then the crosspiece connecting her breasts. He watched and tried again. The cloth reacted, but she just sat there staring through him toward the door. He glanced at the windows, took Penelope's hands from her lap and crossed them over her chest like bindings, then went to close the curtains. He pulled one of the cords, and the drapes began to close, another gentle, rushing movement barely audible in the emotion-laden room. Until . . . .

       Until a snarl in the mechanism of the traverse rod. Sharp-Nose jerked on the cord several times, but the gentle, rushing movement was no more.

       Penelope bolted into awareness at the dissonance, shook her head as if to clear the daze, seemed to remember where she was. She started for the door but was delayed by having to thrust Sharp-Nose's chair out of her way. He heard the chair and lunged, catching her as her hand found the doorknob. He turned her around, pulled her head back by her hair, and started kissing her. She bit him, and he let her go. But she still didn't have time to throw the bolt lock before he grabbed her again and turned her around until he was between her and the door.

       Penelope sucked energy and willpower and went all-ingénue.

       "Oh, Professor Sharp-Nose, it was so much nicer before. Can't we do it that way again? Please? I'm not very experienced in these things, after all. Please? Let's sit back down, and I'll close my eyes and you can . . . ." She took his hand and led him back over to his desk chair, which he was careful to keep between her and the door. She sat down again and tugged on his hand until he sat down, too. He didn't trust her, but he didn't know what she could possibly do under the circumstances. She crossed one leg over the other and angled them slightly to her left, only logical since Sharp-Nose's desk was now close in on her right. He was bending toward her when she suddenly turned her legs back in again and, without uncrossing them, used her upper one to kick his chair in the middle of the edge of the seat between his knees. The only rug in the room was a small one behind his desk, and the chair rolled beautifully. She gave it enough momentum to cover the short distance and crash into the door. Sharp-Nose's feet flew up and his head back. When contact was made between door and chair, his head hit the doorknob and must have stunned him. Penelope grabbed her bag off his desk. With adrenaline strength, she put both hands on the arms of his chair and propelled it to her left. It went straight for the windows, and Sharp-Nose's arm was pinched against the radiator beneath them. The clatter and jarring had stilled by the time she had the door open. She slammed it so hard that one of the bookends on Sharp-Nose's desk slid off; the books followed, one by one.

       Penelope ran all the way down the tower stairs and the two flights of stairs of the main building. This time she took the opposite route around the quadrangle to the bus stop, but a bus wasn't due for another half-hour. She walked as quickly as she could to the West Campus parking lot and managed to get a ride back to East with a guy who, fortunately, was also in no mood to talk.

       She went straight into the dorm and used the phone booth with the outside line to call Tall-Man. She told him concisely but emphatically what had happened. He promised to call her back the next day to advise her what to do. She showered, gave a terse report to Nell, and went to bed. A little after 9:00, however, she got up and asked Nell to accompany her to the snack bar for a hot dog and Coke.

       Meet-Help and Ethereal discussed the situation and decided they should give the facts to someone with as much power in the department as Sharp-Nose: Professor Languages. Penelope was now in the second semester of his two-semester graduate course in History of the Language. Languages not only knew the rumors about Sharp-Nose giving female students a difficult time but had some "proof" of his own. He'd roomed with Sharp-Nose at a convention some months back and had heard him talk in his sleep. The man was deranged, but who could prove it? Penelope would only be destroyed herself. Best to talk to Sharp-Nose confidentially and let him know that "people knew" and that, "if there were recurrences, steps would be taken."

       Penelope completed her senior year without returning to Sharp-Nose's class, though she was not entirely surprised to receive credit for auditing it. She in fact saw Sharp-Nose no more. She did get a full fellowship, though not a Woodrow Wilson, to the graduate school of her choice and considered herself "healed" when she was finally able to quip that she'd decided to go on to graduate school when one of her undergraduate professors had chased her around his office.

. . .

       Penelope’s half-sister, Prudence, was twelve years younger, and no one was surprised when she chose the same university, planning to continue through med school. She won its most prestigious scholarship, for which Penelope had been merely a finalist. Her freshman year, she was enrolled in all advanced courses, including British Literature with Sharp-Nose, though the name somehow never came up when she wrote or talked to Penelope, who knew only that the instructor was old and very sarcastic.

       Around the end of February of her freshman year, uncommon Prudence Malleable committed suicide in the very common way of carbon monoxide from her automobile. She left no note, but her roommate finally admitted that Prudence had been raped several weeks earlier and had refused to get help. She hadn’t named the rapist, though Francie had gathered that it was someone Prudence knew and that no one was likely to believe her. The police discovered nothing, and the university hushed up the case.

       In Prudence’s school things, which their father had turned over to Penelope, she found some fifty or so promising haiku and a great deal of doodling and list-making at the tops of notebook pages. In a list of Prudence’s professors, each with a letter-grade rating, Sharp-Nose’s name was x’ed through.

. . .

       In fall, 1980, Professor Foul-Mouth Sharp-Nose was found murdered in his office in 366 Kallen Building. He was naked but lay stretched out on his desk under a white sheet. He had been emasculated, some of his parts stuffed in a crystal bud vase with a salmon-colored rose. His thinning hair had been backcombed, then brushed wildly around his face. Parts of a smashed pewter-handled brush were thrown about the room. The office curtains had been folded carefully to serve as a pillow for his head. The traverse rod had been used as an instrument of partial disembowelment. It extended from the body on the desk like a long tail and had been bent over the edge of the desk to drag pitifully on the floor. A black cross had been painted carefully across his chest, the upright running from just above the navel to the neck; the crossarm, completely across his breasts. The heart was very carefully cut out and had been placed in a silver chalice on the desk. No one could remember that Professor Sharp-Nose had ever owned such a vessel. The tongue was blistered and appeared to have been burned, perhaps by a candle flame. The lights were off when he was found by the janitor before 8:00 A.M., but six candles had burned themselves out at various points on the desk around the body. All of his files had been removed and were never found. Neither were his clothes. What appeared to be a pile of confetti in one corner was the remains of a copy of his book on Ezra Pound. His left kneecap was painted like a Clara Bow mouth in a garish red but not with a cheap lipstick. The room still reeked of "Tigress" by Faberge', which had been used to anoint the body. The victim’s fingernails and toenails had been carefully painted with an expensive pink polish. The body, with the exception of the head, had been shaved. The eyes had been carefully made up, again with not-inexpensive cosmetics. The desk chair was on three wheels and slumped morosely in one corner. The fourth wheel stood erect in Sharp-Nose's navel, causing a phallic-like bulge under the sheet.

       The authorities concluded that it must have taken at least two hours for the killers to deal with Professor Sharp-Nose and that he’d probably died of a coronary brought on by shock. He made more of a splash in the media than his book on Pound and his hundred-plus articles in learned journals had ever made in academic circles. The case went unsolved.

       Rumors spread of a devil cult on the campus, and much was made of its Gothic architecture. Someone remembered that another English professor, years earlier, had committed suicide by jumping out of a tower window on West Campus. His body had gone down into the two-foot square space enclosed by four towers and had been almost impossible to retrieve. The tools for so doing were enumerated at length. Someone else brought up Prudence's suicide but dismissed it as too tame and turned instead to the junior boy, before her time, who had splattered himself by leaping from the chapel’s carillon tower and broke simultaneously the oldest dean on campus. The university gardens became mixed up in the public mind with the arboretum of a neighboring institution where several coeds over a period of three years had been raped and murdered, their bodies mutilated. A freshman with a humped back suddenly became the object of such speculation and persecution that, with the university's encouragement, he dropped out of school for a semester. Ira Levin was rumored to be living near campus getting atmosphere for a new novel. One graduate student was forced by his adviser to abandon his dissertation topic because he intended to concentrate his efforts on the bloody ground of the university instead of being content to re-maul Carson McCullers and Flannery O'Connor. The best fraternities started having exorcism parties until the administration banned them. Coeds organized covens. The fringe element of the student population acquired new status, and the "freaks" caught on in much the same way as the Milkmaid and Thresher Poets of the eighteenth century. To be odd was to be in. The favorite hangouts of the students changed decor to accord with the devil and witch craze. The film series on campus brought in Obsession, Psycho, Rosemary's Baby, The Other, The Exorist, The Omen, and Carrie and showed an episode from The Amazing Bionic Amazon about a girl-child with powers of psychokinesis. The Freshman English Committee discussed adding to the curriculum a section on the occult but dallied until the craze finally ran its course. One of the Mediaevalists proposed a course in "Alchemy and Literature." Euripides' Medea achieved an all-time high in campus popularity and fostered a revival of Greek period-clothing comparable to that of the days of the outbreak of Neoclassicism in France. The campus newspaper, renamed The Devil’s Due, ran a weekly column on "Facts about the Occult." A favorite drink at all social occasions became "Devil's Brew." The Campus Players switched from Twelfth Night to Macbeth that spring. Somebody rediscovered Marvin Kay's Bullets for Macbeth, and it raced to the top of the chart of what the students were reading. Somebody else discovered that Richard Nixon had once suggested a course on "Law and the Occult." Everyone was sorry when Bishop Fulton J. Sheen died before he could come to campus to speak on exorcism. Vincent Price was suggested as a substitute. Propaganda from the occult craze began to be used to oppose abortions. A wit referred to this obsession as "No abortion without Hexation." A noted children's literature specialist on campus published an article on "The Demonic Elements in The Wizard of Oz, Heidi, and Lassie, Come Home." When a representative from the student newspaper queried him as to why the literature chosen had not been of a more current flavor, he indicated that he was "getting there." The annual spring frolics included a contest for "Ms. Witch." "Which Witch?" became the newest "in" place. The Alumni News published a letter from the Dean of the Divinity School asserting the fatuousness of the whole craze and unequivocally dispelling the rumors of a movement afoot to replace the devil, the campus logo, with a new symbol. On the strictly hush-hush, a candidate for an administrative position was excluded from consideration when someone pointed out that his middle name, "Nomed," formed an anagram for "demon." A rumor surfaced that Bernstein and Woodward were coming to campus in the summer to "nose about" into the series of bizarre deaths. They had become interested, it was claimed, when someone had tipped them off about former President Nixon's involvement with the supernatural.

. . .

       A few years later, under a pseudonym, a female academic who helped birth Women’s Lib published a monograph, parts of which even the bacchantes would have found extreme. It claimed that Lady Alice Egerton, within two years of her participation in the first performance of A Mask, was mortified that she’d been ninny enough to have acted the fatuous role John Milton penned for her. No one took her seriously after her appearance in Comus, and great ladies do not forgive easily. Years passed. Sometime before Mary Milton, née Powell, returned to her husband in London in 1645, the two women had a tête-à-tête. Mary may have told Lady Alice what the unspeakable event was that had driven her from her husband's arms. Egged on by Lady Alice, she returned as his "bosom snake" to lay his coming blindness to syphilis and poison their daughters against him. In her more prestigious circle, Lady Alice found ever more ladies with grievances.

       Once Mary and Lady Alice struck their bargain, the whole revenge scheme went underground for centuries. The Aggrieved flourished in secret and struck back at men who violated and misused. Carefully, the rituals passed down from generation to generation. The Aggrieved were careful to mask their handiwork. The desecration of Milton's grave was passed off as the work of curio-seekers; of Cromwell's, to the changeableness of the masses prepared to re-enter royal bondage. Hardly anyone knew of what Cromwell had done to Hannah Crecy. Charlotte Corday went after Marat because it suited The Aggrieved that he should be destroyed as the wages of the syphilitic marks on his body, Jacques-Louis David notwithstanding. Desirée Bernadotte stood with her "sisters" in The Aggrieved to watch the trouncing of the short emperor called Napoleon. According to the monograph, The Aggrieved do not weaken of purpose even if men exchange their bangs for whimpers or revel in the bigness of their littleness.

Lynn Veach Sadler has a B.A. from Duke and an M.A. and a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois. Formerly a college president in Vermont, she has won an Extraordinary Undergraduate Teaching Award, pioneered in Computer-Assisted Composition, and received the Distinguished Women of North Carolina Award for education. Her academic publications include five books and some sixty-eight articles, and she has edited eighteen books/proceedings and three national journals. She now runs a small press and is a creative writer. A chapbook, Poet Geography, is forthcoming (2003) in the Mt. Olive College Poetry Series; her poems have been published in, or are forthcoming in, for example, Asheville Poetry Review, Journal of African Travel Writing, Main Street Rag, The Wolf Head Quarterly, Pudding Magazine, Lite, Bay Area Poets Coalition Anthology, The Abiko Literary Quarterly, The Robert Frost Review, Poet’s Page, Amelia, The Sandhills Review, Snakeskin Poetry Webzine, and Whiskey Island Magazine. Her stories have been published widely and have won the North Carolina Writers’ Network, Talus and Scree, and Cream City Review competitions. Her unpublished novel, Tonight I Lie with William Cullen Bryant, selected for the 1992 Blumenthal Writers and Readers Series, was runner-up for the 1997 Dana Award. For her first play (1996), Gnat (a spin-off of the 1831 Nat Turner uprising), the (professional) Temple Theater (Sanford, NC) received the North Carolina Arts Council New Works grant and the Paul Green Foundation New Play Award; the play received a Paul Green Multi-Media Award (NC Society of Historians). Sassing the Sphinx was commissioned for the First International Robert Frost Symposium. The recently completed Coming Country (Battle of New Orleans, War of 1812; libretto, lyrics) is her first musical.

Please post a message on our community bulletin board, or send email to editor@serpentinia.com to let us know what you think about this story, and we'll pass your message along to the author.