and you got a line on your CV and a swift boot to one of the University of North Dakota’s satellite campuses. But Sonia had a house, and a cat, and furniture, and a favorite coffeehouse where they didn’t play the music too loud, and she wasn’t leaving Boston for anybody. So she had to find something pretty spectacular...
The problem was that she had gotten greedy. No American was writing good novels in the 1820s, unless you counted James Fenimore Cooper, and Sonia certainly didn’t, except for, maybe, maybe, The Pioneers (1823) . If she’d set it twenty years later with the Transcendentalists and Hawthorne, she would have had a better chance. But as it was, it felt like every English professor was out to get her.
In the end, it was the agricultural historians who brought her down. It turned out that the climactic scene with the McCormick reaper in the background was totally anachronistic. And then the gun nuts weighed in, and she’d given a minor character a Winchester rifle to hold, which was, unfortunately, completely impossible.
And her timing had been terrible, too. In the same year, a couple of historians had been found to have falsified data-- one of them had supposedly found probate inventories which didn’t exist because they had burned up, dramatically enough, in the San Francisco earthquake of 1909. And another man had interleaved his histories of the Vietnam War with personal reminiscences of the conflict, when he’d spent his whole stint as a professor at West Point. Reporters like when things come in threes, and Sonia became the perfect capstone to their articles.
When the investigation was completed, Sonia was pretty sure that she wouldn’t be teaching at Winthrop come fall. But she was surprised when the outside investigator, a friendly guy from Brown who kept showing pictures of his baby daughter to everyone, leaned in and whispered in her ear that the report was coming out on Monday and she should leave town before then. “Don’t bring your stuff,” he said. “Just leave it. Just go.”
Of course she hadn’t listened. She’d play this out, she’d collect her last paycheck, and then she’d figure out what to do with the rest of her life.
She had never thought about doing anything else. The life so short, the craft so hard to learn...
Holding her engraved summons from the Board of Overseers in her left hand, Sonia scanned the list of names apparently engraved on the slate wall. There it was. SONIA THAL. She touched the name and it melted under her fingertip into nothingness. One of the slate panels slid back, revealing an ancient elevator. There was no one inside. Apparently it was waiting for her.
Sonia stepped inside and could feel the elevator bounce downwards slightly. But the door didn’t close. Then she realized that it was one of those ancient elevators that only worked when the inner metal cage snapped into place. She closed the creaking metal cage, the outer door shut, and without Sonia even pressing a button, the elevator began to move downwards. Could this be right? But there was no button for her to press.
The door opened on an ancient hallway hewn from slate walls. She had never been anywhere this old in the university, and there was something claustrophobic about the place, like it had been built by a smaller generation of men. And it smelled strange, like ancient dirt, the sort of dirt that reminds you that every piece of soil in the world was once part of an animal or a plant, and most of the world has been dead a very long time.
“What’s going on?” she said, to the portly man in the grey pinstripe suit, mopping his face with a white linen handkerchief. Mr. Dudley. That was his name. Head of the Board of Overseers. She'd seen him once or twice at faculty events, and he'd sent her a personal note when she won the James Russell Lowell Prize.
Perhaps she should be more polite to him, but her
The problem was that she had gotten greedy. No American was writing good novels in the 1820s, unless you counted James Fenimore Cooper, and Sonia certainly didn’t, except for, maybe, maybe, The Pioneers (1823) . If she’d set it twenty years later with the Transcendentalists and Hawthorne, she would have had a better chance. But as it was, it felt like every English professor was out to get her.
In the end, it was the agricultural historians who brought her down. It turned out that the climactic scene with the McCormick reaper in the background was totally anachronistic. And then the gun nuts weighed in, and she’d given a minor character a Winchester rifle to hold, which was, unfortunately, completely impossible.
And her timing had been terrible, too. In the same year, a couple of historians had been found to have falsified data-- one of them had supposedly found probate inventories which didn’t exist because they had burned up, dramatically enough, in the San Francisco earthquake of 1909. And another man had interleaved his histories of the Vietnam War with personal reminiscences of the conflict, when he’d spent his whole stint as a professor at West Point. Reporters like when things come in threes, and Sonia became the perfect capstone to their articles.
When the investigation was completed, Sonia was pretty sure that she wouldn’t be teaching at Winthrop come fall. But she was surprised when the outside investigator, a friendly guy from Brown who kept showing pictures of his baby daughter to everyone, leaned in and whispered in her ear that the report was coming out on Monday and she should leave town before then. “Don’t bring your stuff,” he said. “Just leave it. Just go.”
Of course she hadn’t listened. She’d play this out, she’d collect her last paycheck, and then she’d figure out what to do with the rest of her life.
She had never thought about doing anything else. The life so short, the craft so hard to learn...
Holding her engraved summons from the Board of Overseers in her left hand, Sonia scanned the list of names apparently engraved on the slate wall. There it was. SONIA THAL. She touched the name and it melted under her fingertip into nothingness. One of the slate panels slid back, revealing an ancient elevator. There was no one inside. Apparently it was waiting for her.
Sonia stepped inside and could feel the elevator bounce downwards slightly. But the door didn’t close. Then she realized that it was one of those ancient elevators that only worked when the inner metal cage snapped into place. She closed the creaking metal cage, the outer door shut, and without Sonia even pressing a button, the elevator began to move downwards. Could this be right? But there was no button for her to press.
The door opened on an ancient hallway hewn from slate walls. She had never been anywhere this old in the university, and there was something claustrophobic about the place, like it had been built by a smaller generation of men. And it smelled strange, like ancient dirt, the sort of dirt that reminds you that every piece of soil in the world was once part of an animal or a plant, and most of the world has been dead a very long time.
“What’s going on?” she said, to the portly man in the grey pinstripe suit, mopping his face with a white linen handkerchief. Mr. Dudley. That was his name. Head of the Board of Overseers. She'd seen him once or twice at faculty events, and he'd sent her a personal note when she won the James Russell Lowell Prize.
Perhaps she should be more polite to him, but her
Similar Books
