“You’ve found David’s books,” noted Professor Whitlaw. She put down the plate she was carrying and reached out for the book on top, the Church title. She held it in her right hand and, pinching the hollow of the binding between her left thumb and forefinger, she ran her fingers up and down the spine a couple of times before putting the book down again with an affectionate pat.
“These are the only ones he wrote?”
“There are two more, which I’ve loaned out, and he was halfway through a fifth one when he disappeared.”
“If you don’t mind I’d like my partner to hear about Sawyer’s disappearance, too. His name is Al Hawkin,- he’ll be here in about ten minutes.”
“Of course not, I don’t mind waiting.”
Kate looked again at the two books, which gave her a topic of peripheral conversation. “Isn’t that a broad sort of reach, from Catholicism to Fools? I thought scholarly types tended to specialize more than that.”
“The Reformation book was his Ph.D. thesis, an investigation into how early Protestantism changed the Roman Catholic Church. And yes, you’d think the two topics unrelated, but David was interested in the ways an existing organization, when confronted by rebellion, moves not away from but toward its opposition. After Luther, the Roman Catholic authorities—” She was off, in full-fledged scholarly flight, and Kate did not even try to follow her. She just nodded at the pauses and waited for the doorbell to ring.
When Hawkin arrived (shaven and dressed in tan shirt, tie, and tweedy sport jacket), the pot of tea had to be emptied and made anew, the plate of what the professor called “digestive biscuits” refilled, and tea begun again. Eventually they were settled, refreshed, and ready. Kate took out her notebook.
“You want to know about David Sawyer,” Professor Eve Whitlaw began. “I first met David in London in 1971. It was July, the beginning of the long vac, and I was in the reading room of the British Library when he came up to my table and demanded to know why for the third time he had requested a book, only to be told that I had it. He was over from America, looking into the Fools movement, which was barely two years old and had caught his fancy. Our interests overlapped, so for the rest of his stay, which was, I think, a couple of weeks, we joined forces. Academically,” she added sternly, although the vision of even the most platonic relationship was inevitably amusing, given nearly two feet in height difference. Seeing neither suspicion nor humor in either bland detective face, she went on. “He was married and had a son. The family stayed in Chicago that summer, although the next year they came over with him. His wife was younger than he was, and the child was eight or nine.”
“Where are they now?” Kate asked.
“I think you’d best let me tell the story as it comes, if you don’t mind. As I said, we joined forces. I drove him around southern England to the various Fool centers, and he helped me with my work. He had a remarkable understanding of cult psychology, and he knew everyone in the field, it seemed. After he’d left, we corresponded. That first spring we wrote a joint article for a journal. The next summer when he came over with his family, they hired a house near Oxford, and for two months I practically lived with them. His wife was the loveliest person, had just finished her Ph.D. in early-childhood education, and their son was sweet, too. He had a mild speech defect and was at that sort of unformed age, but he had occasional sparkles of joy and intelligence. Ay, what a grand summer that was.
“At the end of it, I went back to gray old London and they flew back to Chicago, and two months later I had a telephone call from David asking if I’d be interested in applying for a job. Teaching undergraduates, to start with, with some research time. I jumped at it, and I got it, and we worked together for the next ten years. They were the best ten years of my life,” she said, pursing her lips as if to keep from having to speak further.
“Now comes the hard part. Perhaps I should point out that David was considerably higher up the ladder than I was. He worked almost exclusively with graduate students and on his own research. In a way, that was a pity, because he was one of the most stimulating lecturers I’ve ever heard. I used to pull him into my classes regularly, just for the pleasure of seeing their faces light up, and to see him respond to them. When he talked about church history, his voice would make poetry out of the councils and the heresies. Brilliant.
“But for the most part, he had graduate students. Some of them were very good,- a few were mediocre—he found it difficult to refuse anyone outright,- he thought it better to let them discover their own limitations. There were a few disappointments, a couple of kids who were angry when they finally realized they weren’t world-movers, but mostly it went smoothly. Until Kyle.
“I never liked Kyle Roberts, and I don’t think it’s only hindsight talking. I didn’t trust him, and I told David so, but he said it would be fine, that it was only Kyle’s rough edges. Kyle came from a very poor family, made it through on some minority scholarship, although he looked straight Caucasian to me, and basically he assumed the world owed him a living. What he wanted was to be a full professor at Yale, no less. David thought… Oh God. David thought it was funny. He thought that when Kyle really knew what he was getting into, he would settle for teaching in some lesser university, or a college. He should have taken his master’s degree and gone away, because he had a wife and two children to support, but his work was just good enough to keep him in the program. David and a couple of the others used to give him part-time jobs, research assistant and teaching aide, but I wouldn’t have anything to do with it. I thought, frankly, that it was cruel to encourage a man who had working-class manners, a family to feed, and no brilliance to think of himself as top academic material.
“Well. By the autumn of 1983, he had been in the program for five years. The first of the men and women he had entered with began to finish their programs, but he hadn’t even had the topic for his dissertation approved, much less written it. Now, that’s not all that unusual—a Ph.D. varies tremendously in how long it takes—but for him it was becoming a real problem, because in his own eyes he was brilliant.
“Then in early December, one of the assistant professors announced that he was leaving, and Kyle went to David and said that he wanted the job. It was utterly impossible, of course. He might just have qualified as a candidate if he’d had the thesis in its final stages, but when he had not even begun to write it? There were at least forty others who would be completely qualified, so why lower the standards in order to get Kyle Roberts?
“It all happened so quickly. Looking back, that’s the most baffling thing, that there was no time for clouds to form on the horizon, no warning. Kyle confronted David, and David finally told him the truth about his academic future. Politely at first and then, when Kyle just refused to understand, David became harder, until he finally lost his temper and said that Kyle was deluding himself if he thought he’d ever reach higher than assistant professor, and that he, David, would be hard put to write a letter of recommendation even for that.
“Kyle had never had anyone he respected tell him that, and it simply shattered him. I saw him when he left David’s office—the whole building heard the argument—and he was just white. Stunned. I will never forget how he looked. And I know, I knew then, that any one of us could have rescued him, just by putting a hand out… But we didn’t. He’d become too much of a leech to risk making contact. I let him walk past me.