“So they were fucking,” Williams said. The word jarred the class. Some students giggled nervously. Williams apparently didn’t register this strangeness, the ripple it created when a professor used language that was so un-professor-like. “They had an affair. How does this change things?”
The girl from the back again: “Pig fell in love with her.”
“And?”
“And he threatened to kill Mike if he touched her again. They were seen arguing by the pool.”
“Maybe Polly was obedient to Pig,” Williams said.
“How do you mean?” asked Dennis.
“I mean maybe he held some authority over her. Maybe he was demonstrating his authority in everything he did. How he dressed, how he spoke to her. Perhaps he made her afraid to defy him.”
“Maybe,” Mary said, “he planted the seeds of the abuse in her head.”
“That’s really interesting, Ms. Butler. And that’s pure Milgram.”
“Who?” someone asked.
“Stanley Milgram. You haven’t seen the statue outside the Orman Library? A dedication to Milgram. He came here in the seventies as a visitor of Dean Orman. He lectured right in this room in February of nineteen seventy-six. Do you just walk past that statue without noticing the inscription? Why must students have such tunnel vision?”
“We have a library?” said a boy in the back. The class laughed, but Williams only grinned and shook his head.
“Milgram conducted behavior experiments at Yale in the sixties,” Williams continued. “He found that people are willing to go along with anything if an authority figure tells them to do it. Perhaps Pig was Polly’s authority figure.”
“I don’t believe that,” said Dennis.
“Let’s test it then,” Williams said. “What if you were told you were going to fail this class if you didn’t, say, stand on your head in the corner. Would you do it?”
“No,” Dennis said. Mary saw him blanch-she knew he was lying.
“Okay,” the professor continued. “What if someone of tremendous authority at this institution, say Dean Orman, came into this room right now and told you that you would be expelled if you didn’t reach across and pull Ms. Butler’s hair. Would you do that?”
“Well, it’s not my head,” Dennis said.
“Exactly!” Williams laughed. “Milgram proved that we will go to great lengths to hurt people if we are told to do it by someone of influence. After all, they know best, right? Dean Orman knows best. He is an authority figure, is he not? He is learned, and his education makes him a figure of control.”
“The Nazis,” Brian said.
“Yes,” Williams said. “Milgram was showing that even notions of right and wrong are meaningless when stacked against authority. We are more obedient to another’s authority than we are to our own instincts.”
Williams stopped speaking. He composed himself, drew in a breath, and went on. “So here we have,” the professor said, “two people who have threatened Mike with his life. Polly’s father and now this guy, Pig. Mike, it seems, is not the most well-liked individual on the planet. Which proves?”
“Polly is lovable,” said Mary.
“Polly is indeed lovable. She is the heroine of this story, after all, and she is counting on you to find her. Some of you have developed an obsession for her already.” Mary looked away from him quickly. He wondered what Troy had told him. “Some of you are thinking about this crime when you should be studying for other classes. I know how it is. This is Polly. What you’re feeling is the intuition to save, to deeply care. This is something that, as a species, we are the only ones capable of feeling. Oh, a mother chimpanzee will save her baby, but only if the baby is in immediate danger. Right now, the danger is abstract. You don’t know what it is. In fact, the danger is conceptuaclass="underline" I have created it. I have told you that Polly is going to be murdered, and you believe me-in a purely metaphorical sense, of course. And so you have followed me into this narrative until you care, some of you deeply, about what happens to Polly.”
Then: “I don’t care.” It was Brian.
“Oh yes, Mr. House? And why not?”
“Because everybody’s going to figure it out anyway. Somebody will get the answer and call someone on the telephone and then we’ll all have it.”
“But what if nobody figures it out?” Williams asked, and the class went silent.
“Why did you send me a photograph of my friend?” Mary said, cutting the silence sharply. She left out the part about the phone call from the campus police; she wasn’t sure what that was about just yet. She didn’t tell him that she and Summer had figured it out. The couch was in the basement of the Sigma Nu house.
“It seems, class,” the professor said, smiling and swiveling his chair back behind the table again, “that Ms. Butler believes that this class is for her. That she’s the only student here. I got your note, by the way.”
He said it loudly, aiming it right at the class. The message: Mary Butler is trying to get a leg up on you. She’s trying to sabotage you.
What had she done that was so wrong? She had simply asked him a question about Summer McCoy. Wouldn’t everyone in the class, if they knew Summer like she did, feel that Williams had designed the e-mail specifically for them?
“The picture was just a picture, Mary,” Dennis said. “It was just a photograph of a party. I think I know some people in that shot.”
“When I send these clues,” Williams said, “I am not singling anyone out. We are all receiving the same information.”
“But that was my…” She couldn’t go on. She suddenly felt awful, as if she’d been tricked not just by Williams but by everyone else in Logic and Reasoning 204 as well.
“It’s not just about you,” Dennis said to no one in particular.
“But he was with her,” Mary said quietly. “Mike was with Summer on that couch…”
Oh God, oh God, oh God. What have I done? Why did I let it get this far?
She felt herself getting up, walking toward the door. It was not fast; it was more of a methodical walk, determined, head down. Before she was at the door, Professor Williams rolled his chair in front of it. It was the closest she’d been to him. She looked at his scarred face, at his eyes, which were deep and whimsical, and in that constant state of enchanted amusement. She smelled him: cigarette smoke. “Stay,” he whispered. There was something stern in his tone, something rough. He was blocking the door fully, with his whole body. “Please…let me go,” Mary whispered through clenched teeth. She reached out and touched him. She did not mean to push him, she simply wanted to make him realize her discomfort, to let him know that she needed to get outside into the fresh air. But he was so strong that she could not move him. “Stay,” he said again, stricter. And though Mary did not want to, she returned to her seat. She felt all the eyes in the class on her, all the mouths ready to erupt with laughter at her expense.