36
LESLIE A. FIEDLER
"She never takes it off winter or summer, cold snap or chinook,"
Professor Snow would insist. "When she bends over, and she's al–
ways dropping something, pencil or chocolate bar or class schedule,
so's
she can bend over, there's nothing but white all the way up."
"White," Vern would repeat; and "Excuse me," Professor
Snow would say, but he always forgot himself into
that
trap.
"I believe she's trying to
excite
me," Professor Snow would
conclude. "Deliberately."
"That's the way them white chicks is," Vern would comment;
and Professor Snow, looking to the janitor for approval would
summarize, "Once an o-fay, always an o-fay, right?"
At which Vern would shout in approval, "Prof, baby, you a
niggah, too." And turning to leave, he would touch the Professor
on the shoulder or upper arm.
Yet Professor Snow was disconcerted to hear Vern breathing
at the door the night the girl in the black raincoat came to his
office just before eleven, breathing hard too, because, she explained:
she just had to know exacdy what Sartre meant by
le
neant,
and
she was sure she would have just missed him, the Professor, she
meant; and she was so
happy
he was there, she meant,
here.
..
It
was confusing to listen to the two breathings, one of which, he was
sure, indicated passion; but how could he tell which?
He was not aware of the moment at which he decided to
assault her, to tug away the tighdy belted coat, thinking of the tiny
inflexible breasts, the hard flat belly scarcely indicated by a navel,
the
Y
of her thighs and underbelly scan;:ely shadowed; yet he was
not surprised to discover Vern beside him, tugging at one lapel
even as he tugged at the other. He could not really believe, however,
that it was "No, Prof, don' do it!" that the Negro shouted; for
it
seemed to him that Vern's face was flushed (but how could it be
flushed?) with the passion that motded his own. Perhaps
it
was the
girl who cried.
Except that it was not the girl, at all; but, he could see-in the
moment before the parchment film of skin that held them broke
apart, and the bones which had moved beneath the black raincoat
scattered across the floor-the Dean of Women, to whom he had
not spoken for nearly twenty years. "They are but
'mummy
possessed,"
he quoted, discovering that he spoke to no one. Vern was gone.
