Death Comes for the Deconstructionist. Daniel Taylor
“So there was something bothering your husband. Do you think there was also a who?”
“Yes. Professor Abramson.”
FOUR
When I asked Mrs. Pratt why she wanted me to start with Daniel Abramson, she looked away and sighed. She said she liked him very much, but there had been some unpleasantness between him and her husband before Abramson’s abrupt retirement the previous year. She said Pratt hadn’t talked about it with her, but had alluded to it obliquely a couple of times, saying something about “doing what I have to do for the good of the department,” and how it was the worst part of his job. She didn’t know anything more specific, but thought it was a place to start.
It certainly wasn’t where I wanted to start. I had taken a class or two from Professor Abramson when I was at the university and thought highly of him. He was definitely old school—the gentleman scholar, highly cultured, fluent in five languages, careful in speech and dress, a man who had put all his faith and hope and love into the life of the mind and the imagination. Abramson had emigrated from Budapest shortly after the end of World War II. Apparently he’d hidden out during the war, posing as a pre-seminary student at a Catholic monastery near Szentendre. He got his PhD at Columbia in the 1950s and had been at the University of Minnesota ever since.
Professor Abramson made a big impression on me when I was a student. He approached each work we studied like a shy lover, quietly praising its form and vision. Sometimes he would close his eyes and repeat from memory the words of the text (in the original language), letting their caressing rhythm flow over him. To tell the truth, it embarrassed us. We would exchange looks and suppress smiles. But I have to say that secretly I admired the hell out of the guy. It must be great to love something that much, to find it that important. Why, he loved Tolstoy more than I ever loved my wife (and I still do love her).
Dr. Pratt loved literature too, but in a different way—more like a mistress than a wife. He once said language performed a kind of Dance of the Seven Veils—now revealing, now concealing; exciting us here, disappointing us there, but ultimately just an illusion, nothing more than a tease. Shakespeare, apparently, was the verbal equivalent of Little Egypt.
And if words were ephemeral for Pratt, so were convictions. He changed his positions more often than a runway model changes clothes. He didn’t have principles, he had attitudes. Better, he had moods. He took positions on things as his humors dictated, but could melt away from them like butter on a hot skillet, melting words and ideas providing the slippery slide of his escape.
There is room for both Pratt and Abramson in the universe, but they did not coexist all that comfortably in the same building. By the time I was at the U, Abramson’s star had set, though he was still respected. Sort of like a former racehorse too old now even for stud, but put out to pasture to enjoy his dotage. His book on the impact of the scientific revolution on literature and art in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had been a standard for twenty years. It was said he had turned down offers from Johns Hopkins and Berkeley to stay in Minnesota. He directed so many dissertations that he had to turn students away.
But things had changed by my time, and more rapidly since. He was eased out of the department chairmanship, on the grounds that he deserved more time to write. He found, as his own peers began to retire, that he was increasingly outvoted on new appointments. He vigorously protested a revamping of the curriculum to emphasize “cultural studies,” but lost in a landslide. Fewer students signed up for his seminars, fewer still asked him to direct their theses and dissertations. The invitations to speak at conferences dried up, the prestigious journals were politely uninterested in his articles, his dog no longer ran to the door when he came home.
It feels more than strange to be going back to the Humanities building at the university—Abramson still has a small office there even after his retirement. I haven’t been back since the day I had my career-ending conversation with Dr. Pratt. The place is definitely haunted.
I leave Judy in the English lounge, where she sits herself down at one end of an abused sofa and pronounces herself right at home.
“You go ahead and talk … I should say, talk to your friend. I will stay here with my own self and … and … watch the world go by.” It’s a phrase our mom used a lot, and Judy laughs with pleasure to have pulled it out at an appropriate time. Judy’s fondness for cliché is positively ontological. Clichés provide a kind of conversational proof that the universe is ordered. Clichés are something you can depend on.
I had called Professor Abramson and explained why I wanted to see him, but neither of us really knows why I am in his office. He greets me very politely and asks how I’m doing. I can tell he is searching my face to see if he remembers me. Heaven knows I never gave him any reason to. I wrote a few indifferent papers for him, took my indifferent grade, and proceeded on with my indifferent life. If he remembers me, it is in the same way one remembers the melting point of copper—a bit of stray information tangled up in a random ganglia in one of the minor folds of the brain.
“Yes, Mr. Mote, I recall your paper on the varying levels of consciousness in the narrative voice in Kundera.”
“You do?” I barely remember the paper myself.
“Well, I won’t claim to recall the details, but I remember thinking it showed a kind of rough promise.”
Rough promise. That was as upbeat an assessment of my life as I’d heard in a long time.
“I’m glad you thought so. Not a promise kept, I’m afraid.”
“Oh, I don’t know. Promises sometimes get fulfilled in unexpected ways.”
I want to get off my life and onto Pratt’s death, so I abandon transitions and make a leap.
“As I explained on the phone, Professor Abramson, Mrs. Pratt has asked me to talk to people here at the university to see if anyone might know something that would be helpful to the police in solving Dr. Pratt’s death.”
“His murder.”
“Well, yes, his murder.”
“One doesn’t solve death, does one? One solves a mystery or a crime.”
“Right. I guess no one has solved death, have they? Sorry.”
Abramson smiles faintly. I already regret accepting this job. When you’re looking into the popping rates of popcorn, no one looks through your eyes into the hollowness of your soul. You just deal with information, not motivation, not implication—not, for heaven’s sake, murder.
As is his custom, Professor Abramson senses my discomfort and tries to relieve it.
“Please forgive me for being pedantic, Mr. Mote. You can appreciate that we are still upset here about what happened. We not only lost a valued colleague in a terrible way, we are also a little worried for ourselves.”
“Why is that?”
“Until they know who killed Dr. Pratt, we can’t be sure it isn’t someone who would like to do the same thing to the rest of us.”
“The rest of who?” (Or should it be whom?)
“The English faculty. Or anyone here at the university for that matter. Things have changed since I began in the profession. It’s a much more … contentious place, as perhaps you noticed even when you were here.”
He is being careful. He is by nature reticent and doesn’t know how open to be with me, neither a student nor a colleague.
“How so?”
“It used to be you could argue about whether Milton ruined English poetry and then walk across the street and have a beer together. It was a difference of ideas, not of a clash of worldviews. Now everyone has an enemies list.”
“Enemies list?”
You can tell he wishes he hadn’t said it.
“Well,