Sweep Out the Ashes, page 17
“Jake’s real cut up. Hope you ain’t—” Then he remembered his prisoner, who was observing him and Diana with stark curiosity, and moved on.
Diana sat down. She felt shaken by the level of anger she had sensed from the Wheeler supporters, and her legs were giving her no other option. Those in the audience who weren’t under arrest or arguing with each other were straggling out of their seats and putting their coats back on. It was a thinning group, no more than eight or ten leftover stragglers. From their faces, Diana judged they had thoroughly enjoyed the Q&A’s exciting conclusion.
Senator Wheeler, deep in consultation with one of the young aides, walked past Diana on his way to the door, glanced at her, paused, and gave her a longer look before he walked on. A minute or two later the young aide was back.
“Miss? The senator wonders if he can know your name?”
The aide was no older than some of Diana’s students. He seemed unsure about his errand, twisting his hands and trying to decide whether to say more. It gave Diana a minute to decide what to tell him.
“Tell him my name is Diana Karnov. That’s Karnov with a K.”
The boy nodded and fled.
Diana’s neighbor eyed her, considering. He was a smallish red-cheeked man who cocked his head like a robin on the hunt. “You must have made quite an impression on the senator.”
“Does the senator have that kind of reputation?”
“Oh, no. Not that I ever heard. Course he’s been single for a long time. He had a wife, years back, some mystery there, but I think she died.”
“I see,” said Diana. “Well, nice talking to you. I’m glad you didn’t get arrested.”
“So am I. But we had an exciting evening, didn’t we?”
“I had the feeling the senator wasn’t surprised.”
“Those women follow him from appearance to appearance. Most of them are from Missoula, from the university. The university is a little pink, as they say. Well, good night, then.”
“Good night.” She buttoned her coat, gathered her handbag and gloves, and thought she remembered a side door from the meeting room to the parking lot where she wouldn’t bump into either Saylor or the senator again. On that hope, she wished herself good luck.
25
Diana stayed in the mansion on Thursday, subsisting on coffee and cheese sandwiches and continuing her second round of reading final papers until she could read no longer. On Friday, with her eyes throbbing from weeping and her intensive reading, she crept to campus on icy streets to hold her office hours and get through the final seminar of the quarter.
The Montana university system’s ten-week quarter schedule was a hundred-yard dash compared with the leisurely sixteen-week semester schedule of the Texas universities, and Diana wondered how the students stood it. She experienced a weary vision of her life through the upcoming winter and spring quarters, and the year after that and the one after that if by some miracle she was rehired.
She was unlocking her office door when the history department’s work-study student hurried out to catch her.
“Dr. Karnov! You’ve been getting so many phone calls!” The girl thrust a handful of While You Were Out notes at her. “Here! This woman’s been calling and calling, and she’s very angry. I could hear her shouting at Nelda over the phone.”
“Yes,” said Nelda, coming out of her own office to join Diana and the work-study student. “What country does that woman think she’s the queen of?”
Diana read through the notes. Call Miss Karnov. Call Miss Karnov. Call Miss Karnov. At the bottom of the stack, Senator Wheeler would like to talk with you over coffee. Please call Zane to confirm.
“Sorry,” Diana said. “She’s my great-aunt, and she’s very elderly, and she’s angry that I’m teaching here and not living at home with her in Seattle. She has no business taking her temper out on you. I’ll call her.”
“One of those, is she,” said Nelda, and she and the student rolled their eyes.
Diana turned on the light in her office and dropped her stack of books and papers on her desk. Then she dropped herself into her desk chair and tried to collect her thoughts. All she had to be thankful for was her unlisted phone number at the mansion. But she had to call in return. Tatiana could have been phoning about anything, after all. Maria’s heart was iffy. Diana had an awful vision of one of the great-aunts causing her own heart attack in a last-ditch effort to force Diana back to Seattle.
And the senator. What—
Diana’s phone rang. She stared at it for a moment before she answered.
It was Nelda. “I have a Zane, here? He’s on the line for you. I’ll transfer him over to you.”
Before she could ask Nelda to say she was out of the office, Diana heard the double pings of the transfer, and then a young man with a tentative voice.
“Dr. Karnov? This is Zane from Senator Wheeler’s office? I left a message for you yesterday? The senator would like to talk with you over coffee. Is there a time when you might—”
“I’m sorry,” Diana said. “I just now got back to my office and saw your message. We’ll be busy with finals this coming week, but—”
Zane sounded distressed. “I think the senator hoped to meet with you today. He’s traveling to Helena tomorrow.”
“I don’t get out of class until five.”
Diana heard a muffled discussion on the other end of the line. Then Zane returned. “Five thirty? In the coffee shop at the Bellevue? Shall I meet you on campus and drive you there?”
The Bellevue was the big motel at the west end of Main Street, where the Q&A had been held. She wouldn’t risk being trapped there without her own wheels when she had no idea whether the senator had recognized the Karnov name and what his interests were. From his perspective, Diana could be a pretty dolly or a major political embarrassment or both. “No, I don’t need a ride. The Bellevue will be fine.”
After she hung up, Diana sat with her hand on the phone. She should call Tatiana and get it over with. If only she didn’t feel so tired. Where had her energy gone?
One of her survey students knocked on her door, wanting to talk to her about the final exam and look at his grades up to now—was there a chance of a strong final exam nudging that C up to a B? Diana spent a good twenty minutes going over the quarter’s readings with him, doing everything but telling him what the questions would be. When he finally left, another student knocked.
“Mark Gervais!” she said, looking up in surprise.
“Dr. Karnov. Can I—”
Diana gestured to the students’ chair. “Mark, I haven’t seen you in class, in what—a week? This close to finals?”
Mark sat and shifted in the chair, looking more like an embarrassed student than the drunk Diana had seen spoiling for a fight. Sober, he was a good-looking boy, a young man, really, with a shock of dark hair and dark eyes that looked everywhere but at her. His nervous energy overrode his features. Diana glanced down at her grade book. He had been maintaining a C, maybe even a C plus, all term. Bright enough but bored.
Now he chanced a look at her. “I been in jail.”
Diana waited.
“Rosalie’s mother took out a restraining order against me. But I—” His voice trailed off.
“You violated the restraining order?” Diana suggested, and Mark nodded.
Another long pause. Voices in the corridor, students on their way to classes. Diana tried not to look at her watch.
“I tried studying for your final while I was in jail,” Mark said. “It didn’t work out so well. Look, I—oh, hell.”
He was on the verge of tears. Diana thought of what she knew about him. A student in the back row of the survey class with a vacant look on his face. A combatant in the mindless violence that erupted like spontaneous combustion in the heart of Versailles. Mark’s part in the battle at the Stockman’s. Mark’s losing fight with Con Stillinger at the Palace. Mark’s thwarted attack on the hippies in the county park. And here he sat in her office, a shambles of a young man in distress.
“Sounds to me as though you’ve made some major mistakes,” she said.
“Yeah.”
“So what are you going to do about it?” Diana thought she could just about scrape up a grade of Incomplete for him, but he was going to have to ask for it. “You’ve hung on all quarter, maybe by your fingernails—”
“It’s Rosalie I gotta do something about,” he blurted. “Look, Dr. Karnov, I’ll take your class over again if I hafta, but Rosalie, she wants to run away to California, she thinks she can be a star, and I think she’s got the voice—”
“Mark, how old is Rosalie?”
His face was a study in misery. “Fifteen.”
“And you’re how old?”
“Twenty-two.”
Diana sighed while he blinked furiously and wiped his nose with his finger until she handed him a tissue from the box on her desk. “Mark, I think I can see why her mother would be concerned.”
“Yeah. I can see that. I’m not stupid. Just dumb.” He wadded the tissue in his fist. “I know what I need to do. Doin it’s another thing. You know what I mean?”
“Actually I do,” said Diana and got a startled look from him.
He shook his head. “You’re somethin else, Dr. Karnov. We all think so.” He studied the tissue in his hand as though he was surprised to see it there, but went on. “Yeah. Quit drinkin. Quit fightin. Take your class over again and pass it. Stay away from—” his voice wobbled. “Stay away from Rosalie. That’s the hard part.”
Diana shook her head. “Is there anything you enjoy doing, Mark?” She didn’t add, besides getting into fights and chasing an underage girl.
Something woke in his face that might have been a dim light. “I play the guitar, some,” he said, “and sing. Nothin like Rosalie, a course.”
All Diana had to offer him was good advice. “So play your guitar. Don’t run away to California. That would be worse than stupid. Worse than dumb.”
And he nodded.
*
Diana listened to Mark Gervais’s receding footsteps and remembered Tatiana. The seminar would start in half an hour. What Mark had said about knowing what to do was one thing, doing it another. Now or never. Diana shut her door, picked up the phone, and dialed.
It was snatched up on the first ring.
“Diana! I must know your plans! When are you arriving in Seattle?”
“Didn’t you get my letter? I’m not planning to come to Seattle for Christmas.”
“That letter. Nonsense. You are coming for Christmas. You will.”
“No,” said Diana. “I will not.”
The other end of the line erupted in a fury, some of it in English, some in Russian. Diana listened for several minutes until Tatiana either exhausted her wrath or her voice.
“Tatiana,” she said, “I will call you again tomorrow. But you must not trouble the department secretary by calling here repeatedly. And in five minutes I have a class to teach.”
A silence, and then, in what clearly was a question and not a command, “You will call me tomorrow?” A pause, a restart. “And you will come for Christmas!”
“Yes, I will call. No, I will not come to Seattle for Christmas.”
Silence.
For the time being it was over. Diana hung up the phone, gathered her seminar materials, and left her office for the classroom.
*
The coffee shop at the Bellevue was full and noisy at five thirty in the afternoon. A clatter of dishes rang from the kitchen, a matching clatter of voices rose from tables and booths. Waitresses in short black dresses hurried back and forth with order pads and pots of coffee. Diana saw Senator Wheeler’s silver head bent over a sheaf of papers in a booth by a window, and she threaded her way to him.
He looked up, saw Diana, and drew a breath as he rose to shake her hand, holding it for just a moment and looking less like an embarrassed man than a stricken man who had to bend toward her to make himself heard over the coffee-goers.
“I don’t think this place is going to do. Shall we try the bar across the hall?”
The bar had plenty of Happy Hour customers, but it was dimly lit, with thick carpeting and heavy draperies that absorbed much of the sound. The senator guided Diana to a table at the back and seated her with a careful courtesy.
“I can ask the waitress to bring coffee here. Or—perhaps a glass of wine?”
He studied her face, intently enough to memorize it, with a raw expression on his own face, as though the political mask had been peeled away from a younger, more vulnerable man.
“It was a shock to see you in the conference room that night. I thought I’d seen a ghost. And then the name.”
This man’s hazel eyes that were her own eyes. The straight lines of brows and mouth that she recognized from the newspaper photograph. The illusion from the screen of the microfilm reader, grown older by thirty years, sitting across the table from her.
“I’m told,” Diana said when her voice returned, “that I don’t look at all like my mother.”
“No. It’s my mother you look like. The way she looked when I was a boy.”
“Did your mother have red hair?”
He nodded. “And hazel eyes like yours. She was very beautiful. Of course, I was a boy looking at his mother.”
The moment stretched. It contained nothing but Diana and this man who continued to gaze at her as though he still wasn’t sure she was real. When he spoke again, his voice was husky.
“For me—right now—Dr. Karnov—it’s as though you dropped out of nowhere. Zane dug up the newspaper article, that you’re a professor at the college, but I don’t know anything about you—where you came from—just your face and that name. Lillia’s name.”
“My name is Diana. I’m twenty-eight now. You must have known that.”
“I knew she—we—” he couldn’t finish.
The cocktail waitress stopped at their table. “What can I get for you and your friend, Senator?”
Diana watched his face struggle back to the physical space of booth and carpeted bar.
“Dr. Karnov—will you let me buy you a glass of wine?”
Diana thought she had never seen a face as naked as his. It dawned on her that he was in a state of shock, or something close to it, and she remembered her own shaken state when Jake got out his phone book and showed her Wheeler, Victor. Since then she had prepared herself through uncounted hours turning the handle of a microfilm reader and scanning years of newspapers in search of the man, and now it was up to her to give him the space of time he needed.
“I’d love a glass of red wine,” she said, “and I’m Diana.”
He spoke the name of a label to the waitress, who nodded and disappeared.
“Senator, when I went to your meeting, I just wanted to see you. That was all. There are questions I have that I think you might be able to answer for me, but I hadn’t planned to get in touch with you.”
“You just would have walked away?” He shook his head. “I sent Zane and Jeff scouting all over the Bellevue, but you’d vanished.”
The cocktail waitress brought two glasses and a bottle, which she uncorked at the table and poured a thimbleful for the senator to taste and approve before she filled both glasses and disappeared again.
“Diana,” he said, and again he lingered over her name before he raised his glass to her. Then he was silent for a long time that Diana did not interrupt, but instead sipped wine that contained a deep fragrance and layers she could taste but could not name.
“Diana.” He looked up from whatever his reverie and found her face. “What do you want to ask me?”
What indeed. Who was Sister Holman, how had Diana happened to be born in Rockdale, Texas, what had happened to Lillia, and how had five-year-old Diana come to live with Tatiana and Maria in Seattle?
“Tell me about my mother.”
“God.” He took a deep draught from his glass. “I have to travel to Helena early tomorrow morning, but I may just get drunk tonight.”
He set down his glass. “Lillia. She was beautiful. And I fucking loved her. I loved her, and I married her, and she was pregnant with our child. And one day she fucking disappeared.” His face wrenched. “That’s all. Well, it’s not all, but—and I apologize for my language, Diana, I wasn’t raised to talk like that in front of a woman, but—”
His face reminded Diana of Mark Gervais’s face earlier that day when he told her about Rosalie. Without knowing what she was about to do, Diana reached across the table and touched the senator’s hand, and that was when she saw the ring he wore.
*
The seniors’ oral reports were scheduled for the late afternoons of Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday of finals week; three groups of four and, on Thursday, a group of three to round out the fifteen students in the seminar. The students had drawn straws, and the two whose papers Diana held the highest hopes for, Cheryl LeTellier and the Blackfeet boy, James Archambault, would give their reports on Thursday, after which the department would meet to discuss the reports and papers and assign their grades. On Friday morning both classes of survey students would meet in Main Hall’s auditorium to write their finals, which Diana would carry back to the mansion to read and grade. Once the grades were turned in and finals stacked in a basket on her desk for the handful of students who would show up in January to claim theirs, Diana’s quarter was done.
What she would do next, she so far had managed to bury under the day-to-day. She had options, she told herself. Ramona’s invitation for Christmas at the Stillinger farm, and now an invitation from the senator.
*
She and the senator had talked until past midnight while he finished the bottle of wine and described her mother for Diana. How he’d been working at a loading dock at the train station in Versailles when he saw the girl in the blue dress step off the Pullman car.
“She told me later she left the train for a breath of air and a look at the town and that she intended to reboard, although she didn’t know where she was going. As far as she could, she said. But I—all I knew at the time was the way she smiled at me, and that I was going to do every damn thing I could to keep her from getting back on that train.”
