Grace by Elizabeth Nunez

Author:Elizabeth Nunez [Nunez, Elizabeth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-48557-1
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2006-08-19T04:00:00+00:00

FIFTEEN

They send an emissary. So Justin is led to believe. In the morning, before first period, when he is sitting in his office reviewing his class notes, she knocks on his door. He gets up to greet her. It is a woman he likes and respects. Helen Clumly. A feminist, or they say she is, but he thinks she is one so accidentally, falling into the role the way his father had when he became an icon for a movement he did not understand.

She is a historian. She has written a dissertation on an analysis of the history of women’s movements in the Third World, examining their commonalties with Western feminist movements. The paper she presented at the International Women’s Conference in South Africa was entitled Are We Really so Different? Overnight it made her the darling of feminists—white, black, Asian, Latina.

Her dissertation was published and soon journals were begging for her articles, publishers vying with each other for the rights to her next book, conventions seeking her out to be their keynote speaker. Now she breathes that heady, rarified air at the top of the Ivory Tower that Justin thinks sooner or later will become impossible for her to live without. Yet she stays at their small, public inner-city college. The attraction it holds for her baffles her agent, but it does not baffle Justin. Both he and she are members of a secret society: professors who at heart are simply scholars, content to spend their days in the dusty stacks of research libraries but find themselves thrust into the limelight by politics.

This, Justin knows, is by no means an accurate description of himself, but the fact remains that if not for that placement test committee, if not for that teenager unable to read his father’s poetry, he would have remained where he was, in New England, in an Ivy League college, teaching predominantly white students and doing research on arcane subjects that nobody cares about. As it is, in two weeks, he will be delivering a paper at a national conference in Atlanta on combating illiteracy among inner-city youths with plays by Shakespeare.

But he is not in the limelight. Helen Clumly is in the limelight. She is the celebrity swept away by political forces: one that would canonize her for her research on women of color, the other because she also speaks for them, because she is one of them. Her college in Brooklyn meets their requirements: The students are overwhelmingly black and female, the politics sufficiently left wing.

“I’ve been asked to ask you—” she says. Her body is stiff, her voice terse. He braces himself.

“Who has asked you to ask me?” He does not let her finish.

“It does not matter.”

“And whatever it is he or she wants you to ask me, why can’t he or she ask it himself or herself?”

Helen repeats, “I have been asked to ask you.” She pauses and looks up at him. “Will you let me finish?’

“Go on.”

“Whether or not you told Mark Sandler that Sylvia Plath gassed herself over a man.

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