It was Friday, November 2. I was now five days out of the hospital and scheduled to resume climbing the three flights of stairs to my Neil Hall room on Monday, yet I felt weaker than I had when they got me up from bed to take my first few steps after the operation. Whom could I call to confirm that Olivia was dead without my also being accused of being the one who killed her? Would news of the death by her own hand of a Winesburg coed be in the papers? Shouldn’t I go over to the library and comb through the Cleveland dailies to find out? The news surely wouldn’t have been carried in the town paper, the Winesburg Eagle, or in the undergraduate paper, the Owl’s Eye. You could commit suicide twenty times over on that campus and never make it into that insipid rag. What was I doing at a place like Winesburg? Why wasn’t I back eating my lunch out of a paper bag down from the drunks in the city park with Spinelli and playing second for Robert Treat and taking all those great courses from my New York teachers? If only my father, if only Flusser, if only Elwyn, if only Olivia—!
Next I rushed from Dowland back to Jenkins and hurried down the first-floor corridor to Dean Caudwell’s office and asked his secretary if I could see him. She had me wait in a chair across from her desk in the outer office until the dean had finished meeting with another student. That student turned out to be Bert Flusser, whom I hadn’t seen since I’d moved from the first of my rooms. What was he in with the dean for? Rather, why wasn’t he with the dean every day? He must be in contention with him all the time. He must be in contention with everybody all the time. Provocation and rebellion and censure. How do you keep that drama going day in and day out? And who but a Flusser would want to be continually in the wrong, scolded and judged, contemptibly singular, disgusted by everyone and abominably unique? Where better than at Winesburg for a Bertram Flusser to luxuriate without abatement in an abundance of rebuke? Here in the world of the righteous, the anathema was in his element — more than could be said for me.
With no regard for the presence of the secretary, Flusser said to me, “The puking — good work.” Then he proceeded toward the door to the hallway, where he turned and hissed, “I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you.” The secretary pretended to have heard nothing but merely rose to escort me to the dean’s door, where she knocked and said, “Mr. Messner.”
He came around from behind his desk to shake my hand. The stink I’d left behind me had long been eradicated by now. So how did Flusser know about it? Because everyone knew about it? Because the secretary to the dean of men had made it her business to tell them? This sanctimonious little piss-hole of a college — how I hated it.
“You look well, Marcus,” the dean said. “You’ve lost a few pounds but otherwise you look fine.”
“Dean Caudwell, I don’t know who else to turn to about something that’s very important to me. I never meant to throw up here, you know.”
“You fell ill and you were sick and that’s that. Now you’re on the mend and soon will be yourself again. What can I do for you?”
“I’m here about a female student,” I began. “She was in my history class. And now she’s gone. When I told you I’d had one date, it had been with her. Olivia Hutton. Now she’s disappeared. Nobody will tell me where or why. I would like to know what happened to her. I’m afraid something terrible has happened to her. I’m afraid,” I added, “that I may have had something to do with it.”
You should never have said that, I told myself. They’ll throw you out for contributing to a suicide. They could even turn you over to the police. They probably turned G.L. over to the police.
I still had in my pocket the dean’s letter welcoming me back “rejuvenated” to the college. I’d only just picked it up. That’s what had drawn me to his office — that’s how foolishly I’d been taken in.
“What is it you did,” he asked, “that makes you think this?”
“I took her out on a date.”
“Did something happen on the date that you want to tell me about?”
“No, sir.” He’d lured me in with no more than a kindly handwritten letter. A bunt dropped for a base hit can be one of the most beautiful things to behold in all of sports. I’ve already put in a word about you with Coach Portzline. He’s eager to see you at tryouts … No, it was Caudwell who was eager to see me about Olivia. I had stepped directly into his trap.
“Dean,” he said kindly. “I’m ‘Dean’ to you, please.”
“The answer is no, Dean,” I repeated. “Nothing happened that I want to tell you about.”
“Are you sure?”
“Absolutely,” and now I could imagine the suicide note and understood how I’d just been bamboozled into perjuring myself: “Marcus Messner and I had sexual contact and then he dropped me as though I were a slut. I’d prefer to be dead than live with that shame.”
“Did you impregnate this young lady, Marcus?”
“Why—no.”
“You’re sure?”
“Absolutely sure.”
“She wasn’t pregnant as far as you know.”
“No.”
“You’re telling the truth.”
“Yes!”
“And you didn’t force yourself on her. You didn’t force yourself on Olivia Hutton.”
“No, sir. Never.”
“She visited you in your hospital room, did she not?”
“Yes, Dean.”
“According to a member of the hospital staff, something occurred between the two of you at the hospital, something sordid occurred that was observed and duly recorded. Yet you say you didn’t force yourself on her in your room.”
“I’d just had my appendix out, Dean.”
“That doesn’t answer my question.”
“I’ve never used force in my life, Dean Caudwell. On anyone. I’ve never had to,” I added.
“You didn’t have to. May I ask what that means?”
“No, no, sir, you can’t. Dean Caudwell, this is very hard to talk about. I do think I have the right to believe that whatever may have happened in the privacy of my hospital room was strictly between Olivia and myself.”
“Perhaps and perhaps not. I think everyone would agree that if it ever was strictly between the two of you, in the light of circumstances it isn’t any longer. I think we would agree that’s why you came to see me.”
“Why?”
“Because Olivia is no longer here.”
“Where is she?”
“Olivia had a nervous breakdown, Marcus. She had to be taken away by ambulance.”
She who looked the way she looked was taken away in an ambulance? That girl so blessed with that brain and that beauty and that poise and that charm and that wit? This was almost worse than her being dead. The smartest girl around goes off in an ambulance because of a nervous breakdown while everybody else on this campus is taking stock of themselves in the light of biblical teachings and coming out feeling just fine!
“I don’t really know what goes into a nervous breakdown,” I admitted to Caudwell.
“You lose control over yourself. Everything is too much for you and you give way, you collapse in every conceivable way. You have no more control over your emotions than an infant, and you have to be hospitalized and cared for like an infant until you recover. If you ever do recover. The college took a chance with Olivia Hutton. We knew the mental history. We knew the history of electroshock treatment and we knew the sad history of relapse after relapse. But her father is a Cleveland surgeon and a distinguished alumnus of Winesburg, and we took her in at Dr. Hutton’s request. It didn’t work out well either for Dr. Hutton or for the college, and it especially didn’t work out for Olivia.”