Cold and Pure and Very Dead Read Online Free PDF Page B

single man to get a child. The usual fears …”
    Then Jill carted Eloise over and thrust eighteen pounds of wet, squirming baby in my arms, and the conversation took a different turn.
    Y ou know who you should talk to about
Oblivion Falls?”
Greg poured a tot of brandy into my coffee. The party was over, and I’d stayed behind to help him and Irena clean up. Now Irena was in the babies’ room changing a diaper, while Greg and I sat on the deck under a lavish night sky.
    “Who?” I didn’t really care. It was so relaxing here with the stars and the almost tropical darkness, that I just wanted to float through the night in a brandy haze. I didn’t ever want to use my intellect again.
    “That new guy in your department. What’s his name? The big hire you made last spring? The Cadaver Chair?”
    I laughed so loud, Irena came to the window to find out what was funny.
    “Palaver
Chair, you idiot,” I said, smacking Greg with a plastic Thomas the Tank Engine place mat. “And his name is Ralph Brooke. Ralph
Emerson
Brooke. But why ask him?”
    “Doesn’t he do the fifties? I remember talking to him about the Beat Generation at the reception the English Department had for him.”
    “Not only does he
do
the Beats, I think he
knew
them all. Maybe he even
slept
with them all, given the degree of intimacy he implied during his interview:
As Jack said to me in ’Frisco. Jack? Why, Kerouac, of course
. From what Brooke says, he was a real hipster in the fifties. Hung out with Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti. Anyhow, he wouldn’t know anything about Deakin. Ralph’s the old-style sexist type of academic who’d die rather than look at a popular woman’s novel like
Oblivion Falls.”
Brooke’s hiring still rankled with me. The uproar in the Enfield College English Department the previous spring over the endowed Paul O. Palaver Chair of Literary Studies had torn the department into opposing factions that might well never reunite, the passions had run so hot. By a single vote, the senior male members of the department had voted in a scholar who was anathema to the rest of us: conservative, white, male, and—as far as I was concerned—perilously close to being embalmed. The
Cadaver
Chair, indeed! The academy has no mandatory retirement age, but even I, as open-minded as I am about most things, thought the age of seventy-four was a bit late for taking on what should be a demanding new job. “WhatProfessor Brooke did in his misspent youth is of no concern to me. It’s his misspent maturity I’m concerned about. Particularly the fact that he’s going to be misspending it in my department.”
    Greg sipped his brandy pensively. “I’m amazed the department’s feminist mafia let a canonist like Brooke get through.”
    A
canonist?
Well, if that’s not already a word, it should be. “We did our damnedest, Greg. But Brooke is Miles’s last stand. They go
waaay
back—Princeton for grad school, then teaching together for a couple of years early in their careers—at Stallmouth College, I think. After that Miles came here and Ralphie went off … somewhere … maybe on the road with Kerouac, for all I know. But he ended up at the University of Chicago for decades. Now he’s here.”
    “So sweet,” Greg said. “Boys together, now together again.” He gave me a big smooshy smile.
    “Greg, I think you’re looped.” I pushed my doctored coffee away. I still had to drive tonight.
    “Just a leeetle tiny bit,” he replied contentedly, “and it feels so damned good.”

4
    S peak of the devil , I muttered to myself first thing the next morning as I glanced out the front window from my booth at the Blue Dolphin diner. Professor Ralph Brooke, Enfield College’s new P. O. Palaver Chair of Literary Studies, plodded up the front steps and into the eatery’s narrow aisle. Following the waitress to a booth in the far back corner, he passed by without seeming to recognize me. Over scrambled eggs and home fries, I had a prime