THE SISTERS

Abstract

1 0 3 R T H E S I S T E R S S A B I N A M U R R A Y From the start, it was a mistake. Carson Bakely was an earnest student, but he possessed a mediocre intellect, and, frankly, I wasn’t sure what to do with him. He showed up during o≈ce hours one sunny afternoon when I had been left to my book – all the other graduate students were no doubt filling the outdoor seats at the Cambridge bars – looking freshly scrubbed and ready for some assignment. He was a good-looking boy, and that was no doubt why my colleague Hillary Hart had accepted him into the doctoral program. But poor Hillary had died at the start of the semester – found dead in her bathtub, apparently having succumbed to a heart attack – and in the scramble to provide supervisors for her advisees (mostly handsome boys) I had inherited Carson. He was the bottom of the barrel, and I remembered how in elementary school I had always been the last chosen for teams; this might make another person sympathetic, but the similarity inspired the same reticence towards him that I had for my younger, ignorant, unappealing, and generally less successful self. I invited Carson in and he sat in the sti√ little chair – other professors had warm, inviting o≈ce furniture, but this encour- 1 0 4 M U R R A Y Y aged students to stay – with a broad, Midwestern smile, even though I’d learned he was from Brooklyn. ‘‘Carson Bakely, right?’’ I asked. ‘‘That’s right.’’ ‘‘What brings you to my gloomy cave on this glorious day?’’ ‘‘Well, I need some help.’’ ‘‘Really?’’ I was sure that Bakely did, indeed, need help, but I had forgotten whom it was that he was writing about. I paged through an unrelated yellow pad hoping that it might jog my memory. ‘‘Nathaniel Hawthorne?’’ ‘‘Herman Melville.’’ ‘‘Ah,’’ I responded. ‘‘And what about Melville?’’ ‘‘See, that’s the problem.’’ He put his hands on the knees of his trousers and looked across the expanse between us with unblinking eyes. ‘‘There’s so much of it.’’ ‘‘Written about it?’’ ‘‘That too.’’ Carson raked his hand through his thick, black hair as if to dislodge a thought that might be trapped there. ‘‘I don’t know if Melville’s really my thing.’’ ‘‘Your thing?’’ ‘‘No. I think Melville is amazing, of course. Who doesn’t?’’ ‘‘For sure.’’ ‘‘Before Hilly died – ’’ ‘‘Hilly?’’ ‘‘I mean Professor Hart. Before Professor Hart died, we’d talked about it. We talked about it a lot.’’ ‘‘It?’’ ‘‘My work. She thought I should stick with American. But maybe start researching something not so . . . ’’ ‘‘Di≈cult?’’ ‘‘Long.’’ ‘‘So what have you chosen as your new topic of interest?’’ I wondered how I would make it through the required hundred pages of dissertation prose, and why it was necessary to encourage Mr. Bakely to waste the next three or so years, after which I, along with my other colleagues, would then be faced with no other choice but to fail him. Carson nodded seriously as if we were in agreement and, with a T H E S I S T E R S 1 0 5 R pronounced set of jaw, declared, ‘‘I’m interested in Emily Dickinson . I want to know everything about her.’’ Of course, it has been forty years since that warm spring day when Carson Bakely’s earnest form cast its shadow on the dusty boards of my o≈ce, but I remember this encounter very precisely because after Carson Bakely was found murdered, I had to go over it so many times. The whole Bakely tragedy was an exercise in tedium foisted upon me by Bakely’s desire to read as little as possible on the way to his Ph.D. Bakely had expressed a desire to learn ‘‘all there was about Emily Dickinson,’’ thinking that this was easily accomplished. As I was the Dickinson scholar, he ended up on my doorstep. Most of my advisees were earnest, plain girls who seemed to think that in the process of unlocking Dickinson’s secrets they would...