The Coming Storm by Paul Russell
Author:Paul Russell
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781466806207
Publisher: Macmillan
Low, coppery sun slanted through the tall windows of this, the most pleasing and historic of the Forge School’s buildings. Constructed in the middle of the nineteenth century from local bluestone, Washington Irving Hall, as it was now known, had housed a military academy for three-quarters of a century before falling on hard times. After the war, Jack Emmerich had rescued it from dilapidation and made the renovated edifice the centerpiece of his fledgling campus. Around it, over the years, had sprung up the half-dozen other, mostly unexceptional halls, modern, no-frills boxes of brick and glass.
The large central foyer, with its double staircase and antique Venetian chandelier, throbbed with the pulse of conversation. Waiters moved through the throng, balancing on their shiny platters an array of vivid hors d’oeuvres or trembling flutes of champagne. Looking grown-up and elegant in their dark blue blazers and red ties, those boys whose parents had been able to come to this end-of-the-semester gathering mingled comfortably with the adults in the room. Louis, who was usually such a curmudgeon about public events, nonetheless managed to rise so well to occasions such as this that Claire had to suspect his ordinary misanthropy was just a guise, some armor of self-protection he donned to combat his various professional anxieties. And as for guises, she had assumed her own for the occasion as well. For the space of two hours, she would be the Headmaster’s Wife.
But it was only a role (she had put on her conservative blue dress and necklace of pearls). Surveying the crowded reception from the second-floor gallery, she relished the idea that no one there—with the possible exception of her husband—had any idea who she really was. Just yesterday she had received in the mail the off-prints from her latest published essay: an extended meditation, in a well-respected journal of women’s history, on the meaning—the semiotics, as she called it—of Pocahontas’s sojourn in the England of King James I. What had particularly seized her imagination was the historical fact of the Native American’s attendance at a court masque meant to celebrate the triumph of civilization over savagery. At the end of the masque, the bower of Zephyrus had opened to expose, to the monarch’s delighted gaze, his beloved Duke of Buckingham, a long-legged and, as far as Claire could tell from the historical record, entirely fatuous young man who was James’s current favorite. But what had Pocahontas seen? About that, the historical record was silent. Nevertheless, this intersection of two worlds—the colonizer and the colonized, the fondly gazed upon and the silenced—was rich with inflection, and Claire had attempted to tease out, in fifteen pages of carefully argued speculation, its somber ironies.
She had no illusions about her general importance as a scholar. She was a humble foot soldier in the trenches. But such work pleased and engaged her. And no one could have been more surprised by her gradual evolution than she. After years of her own silence, she had learned to ask questions, not flippantly, the way she had at Barnard, but with increasing acuity.
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