The Puzzled Heart by Amanda Cross Read Free Book Online Page B

leaned back and assumed, with a sigh, a listening position.
    “I’ve been thinking, starting from the beginning and analyzing the situation anew. My first observationis that, however closely the student who wrote that antifeminist letter may be connected with the radical right, he is not the only male chauvinist student around. No doubt you remember the boys at Cornell who wrote in favor of silencing women and having a free ticket to rape—they wrote on e-mail I think, but the means of broadcasting are immaterial.” Harriet nodded that she did remember. “So,” Kate continued, “I began thinking of students who might have objected to my course, or might think this sort of caper as funny as rape, if you follow me.”
    “Closely,” Harriet said, sipping.
    “Here’s yet another example,” Kate said, picking up a clipping and waving it at Harriet, who watched unperturbed. “In a ‘Forum’ discussion, ‘Discouraging Hate Speech without Codes,’ in
Academe
, the magazine of the AAUP, the American Association of University Professors.” “I have heard of it,” Harriet interjected mildly; Kate ignored her. “Professor Susan Gubar reports the following: ‘What is to be done when I discover a note affixed to the office door threatening to disrupt a Women’s Studies symposium on sexual violence or, most malevolently, I find a burn mark up and down the same door? What do I do if a student protests the one lecture spent on women’s issues as “too much about feminism” by tearing the course pack up before the class? Or if one of my graduate students tells me she has received notes from a freshman who threatens to stalk her?’ I’m justreading you this,” Kate added, “so that you’ll see where I’m coming from.”
    “I’ve seen it long since,” Harriet said. “But remember, Gubar teaches in Bloomington, Indiana, where they’re a little less sophisticated.”
    “Exactly. They might not be sophisticated enough to think up a kidnapping scheme, but my students are; I just wanted to establish the facts in a general way.”
    “Consider them established.”
    “Okay. What I’m suggesting, as you’ve no doubt already guessed, is that this may well be a prank of some student, particularly the sort who belongs to a fraternity—an assumption based on what some of my women students have told me of assaults on them in fraternities—though not all fraternities, one hopes—and I intend to follow that lead as far as I can. For instance, who rented the limo into which Reed was forced?”
    “Naturally Toni thought of that. She has already discovered the car was hired under a corporate arrangement a male undergraduate at your university’s father has with a limo company.”
    “Nice of you to let me know,” Kate interjected, “however ungrammatically.”
    Harriet ignored this. “A man called up and ordered the car, giving the name of the company and the number of the account. Of course,” Harriet said, pausing maddeningly to refill her glass, “we interviewedthe student in question. He turns out to be a wealthy, generous, rather laid-back guy who had been heard often ordering limos through his father’s firm. But he didn’t do this; someone else did, and he is certain it isn’t one of his close friends. The company had nothing to add except that the car picked up two young men in midtown, took them up to the law school, waited for a ‘friend,’ i.e., Reed, and took them only a few blocks before it was dismissed. Toni has talked to the driver, who rather had the impression the passenger they picked up was requiring persuasion to get into the car and then to leave it, but it wasn’t anything
heavy
—his word. So you see, my dear, we have got that far. But we still think the letter-writer was probably involved.”
    “Good,” Kate said. “We have a meeting of minds then, which is always so encouraging. Now, I’ve decided a few things. First, no more of this secrecy and message game. That is, I think