“I showed these pictures of you and Robinson,” I said. “And the woman on the desk recognized you.”
She stared at the photographs.
“This came on you kind of sudden,” I said. “Should we sit on this bench, while you think about it?”
Without comment, she plopped down on a bench beside some evergreen bushes near the entrance to the administration building. She was staring at the pictures I still held for her.
“Those pictures don’t prove anything,” she said finally.
I put them back into my inside pocket.
“No, but they’re suggestive, coupled with what the Sea Mist lady told us, and what Robinson Nevins said.”
Again she was silent, staring at the place where the pictures had been. She let out a long breath.
“Well,” she said, “you seem to have invaded my whole life.”
“Just doing my job, ma’am.”
Lillian looked at me somberly.
“Not a job one can admire,” she said.
If Lillian had a sense of humor, I had no idea how to access it.
“So,” I said. “Since we can assume you know Robinson Nevins was heterosexual, a question presents itself.”
Lillian continued to look at me with blank sobriety, which might have been her attempt to look stern. Lillian’s mind didn’t seem to move very quickly, even for a professor. While the question had come upon her rather suddenly, it was a pretty obvious question. I waited.
Finally she said without affect, “What question?”
“Why you reported to the tenure committee a story about Robinson Nevins that you had considerable reason to doubt.”
“He could have been bisexual.”
“Yes he could have. Did you think he was?”
“I didn’t know he wasn’t.”
“Did you ask him?”
“Of course not.” She was, maybe genuinely, outraged. “One’s sexuality is neither my business nor yours.”
I looked at her for a while, aware of my breath going in and out.
“It’s breathtaking,” I said. “You have ruined a man’s career by repeating a slanderous allegation you know to be false, and you still find a way to mouth moralistic platitudes when you’re caught.”
“I’m sorry you think the right to privacy is a moralistic platitude.”
“I am also not sure if you know that you keep diverting the topic or not. I don’t think you’re smart enough, but now and then I’m fooled.”
She stood, holding her briefcase with both arms, as if I’d tried to cop a feel.
“I do not have to sit here and allow you to berate me,” she said.
“No you don’t,” I said. “And neither will the Dean of Liberal Arts, when I discuss it with him.”
She sat back down again, hugging her briefcase a little closer.
“You’d go to the dean?”
“Yep. Probably go to Bass Maitland, too. And probably the student newspaper.”
She was horrified. The look of haughty incomprehension had been replaced by wide-eyed staring fear.
“I want a lawyer,” she said.
“Sure,” I said. “Go get one. I’m not a cop. You’re not under arrest. But I now know that Robinson Nevins got jobbed in his tenure hearing, and I know by whom, and I can prove it, and I will. What I don’t know yet is why, but I’m not sure
The class break had ended and the next period had begun. The quadrangle was relatively empty. Some students sat on the library steps smoking, and listening to headphones, and talking and thinking about sex. In the small plot of dirt where the evergreens grew by the steps of the administration building, some tough-looking city birds, starlings mostly, and a few sparrows, pecked industriously for whatever birds peck after. In front of the university, MBTA trains stopped and let people out and took people on before they tunneled back underground.
Finally in a voice that sounded almost girlish Lillian said, “You wouldn’t understand.”
“Probably not,” I said.
She took her left hand off her briefcase and began to play with the hair at the back of her neck.
“A university faculty is special. It is a place, maybe the only place, where the ideal of a civil society still flourishes.”
“I can see that,” I said.
If she heard me she didn’t show it.
