My Jane Austen Summer: A Season in Mansfield Park

am I looking for?'

'Your Randy Lord.' Omar pointed to a picture in the middle of the page and folded his arms across his chest.

There, posing in aristocratic understatement, stood my Randolph with a demure socialite. The caption read, Lord Weston and Sara Stormont at the Benefit for the Sick Dentists' Trust. I studied the picture, wondering who she was, how serious their relationship might be; another Someone Else.

Omar wagged a finger at me. 'You're not letting Vera use you, are you?'

'I don't think so.'

'Good. Don't let her pump you up so you can't think for yourself. You can't save Literature Live for Nigel, so don't let her convince you it all hangs on you snuggling up with the lord of the manor. It doesn't.'

'No?'

'Look at Vera. Look at her life. Lonely as can be, married to a gay man, no family to call her own.' Omar leaned forward. 'I know how charming she is, but you need to only connect yourself.'

'Let's talk about something else,' I said. 'When are you leaving?'

He looked at his watch. 'Midnight, why?'

'No,' I said. 'When are you going home—to Michigan?'

'Friday,' he said, opening his laptop.

'You're not staying through the end?' I asked.

'It's over,' he said.

I sat back and folded my hands.

Omar removed his glasses and asked me, 'Why don't you come with me?'

'And do what?'

'Continue your work connecting disjointed personalities; the university is full of them.' He smiled. 'And spend evenings amusing me with your stories.'

I rolled my eyes.

'No, really. Why don't you come to Michigan? Go back to school.' Omar leaned back on his chair's hind legs. 'Get your MFA.'

'No money.' I bit my lip.

'You can work on campus. Human resources, isn't it?' He wiped the lens on his shirt.

'I don't remember.'

'You can stay with me until you get your act together.'

I took a deep breath and looked at him. Without glasses, he appeared younger and more vulnerable. 'That's a very tempting offer, Omar.'

He rested on all four chair legs. 'Think about it,' he said.

'I'll think about it.'

*   *   *

With less than a week of literary festival left to me, I sat on my bed, holding Magda's book, staring at Bets's mattress. I'd stripped her bed, folding the matching bedspread and stuffing it in her closet. The naked ticking satisfied in a mildly punitive ascetic sense. Bets's side of the bureau was bare, as well as her side of the sink and table. I'd removed the things she'd stored under my bed and stuffed all of it in her closet and forced the door shut. I wanted to be completely alone.

I'd spent all day Monday and Tuesday, festival days off, reading in my room. Books accumulated in stacks around my bed. Not novels, but critical essays about Jane Austen and Mansfield Park, the type of thing Vera had encouraged me to read back in June. I discovered back issues of Persuasions, a scholarly journal published by JASNA, the existence of which blurred my understanding of the distinction between academics and Janeites. Essays about Mansfield Park referenced names I'd heard in Nigel's conversations and in lectures, and I worked backward to the primary sources listed in bibliographies. Most books were on our shelves, and the deeper I read, the better I understood what I'd been doing all summer.

I survived by eating Bets's leftover cheese crackers and drinking water from the sink in my room. By Tuesday evening, when I began reading the slavery essays in the book Magda had left me, a week had passed since Randolph said he'd call. So tired, yet unable to sleep, I struggled to understand how anyone could believe that Jane Austen was complicit with slave-owning society. No way.

But then I read, and reread, that Jane Austen's father was trustee of a plantation in Antigua. The godfather of Jane's oldest brother owned the plantation, and details of his life bear striking similarity to those of the Bertram family. Jane Austen drew on details from her family to create Mansfield Park. This information wasn't in anything else I'd read about her life. Jane Austen had secrets. Or maybe her father had secrets. But she discovered them. And she never told me. I would have told her something that important. I told her everything. Perhaps we weren't as close as I thought. Perhaps the person in my peripheral vision wasn't Jane Austen at all.

I answered my phone that evening, the last Tuesday of the season. 'Hello?' I said, groggy, hung over from the reading binge.

'Hullo?' A male voice. Not Willis.

'Randolph?' The depth of his voice stirred me. Vera would be relieved at the news of his call.

'I've been meaning to call you,' he said.

I should be careful. Hold back.

'Can you have dinner tonight?'

Don't do it, I told myself. 'Um, yes,' I answered.

'There's a small problem,' he said. 'I'm afraid I'm engaged, but should be free by seven. Any chance you can meet me at my hotel?'

I responded without thinking. 'Yes, of course.'

'Seven then?'

'Yes.'

'Excellent. See you then.'

My Jane Austen dimmed in the corner.

Twenty-Six

By the time Vera drove into Knightsbridge and stopped at the richly beveled glass door of Randolph's hotel, I was unfashionably late; Vera had been too involved coaching me to concentrate on making the lights. 'And the most important thing,' she said, wagging her finger like a gothic villain, 'leave him wanting more.' Thanks to Vera's talking and driving I was also unfashionably nervous.

'Where's the business plan?' I asked.

'Here it is.' Vera pulled the envelope from the gap between the seats. 'Good luck, dear,' she said, as if I were a finalist in the Lady Weston Pageant, stepping onto the stage rather than the curb. 'Of all the women in this city, Randolph chose to have dinner with you,' she said.

The doorman in long coat and derby hat held the door as I entered, my head high, prepared to meet the Eleventh Baron of Weston. Glamorous Actress Enters. Chandeliers glittered overhead and a grand bouquet of white flowers, roses and hydrangeas, graced the entry. Crisp black and white marble tiled the floor and a lamp trimmed in ebony and gold suggested Napoleon slept here. Perhaps Randolph was watching my entrance from just beyond the double doors to the salon. Although he mentioned a previous engagement, I nursed a romantic vision of a handsome nobleman stepping forth to claim me, anticipating the feel of his hand on my back. I stalled, pretending to consult my envelope, allowing Randolph every chance to emerge from the cigar brown lair of tufted club chairs. Finally, it became necessary to concede his absence, but without Vera's enthusiasm, I began nursing a less romantic vision of Randolph held up by a press photographer: Sara Stormont, the real candidate in the Lady Weston contest, posing possessively at his side.