Page 61 - WTP VOl.XII #2

phoned me when he found my name on some U. stationery in the apartment. He wanted us to take care of the body. How could I do that? It just wasn’t our place. Then they found Ruta’s name. She or somebody knew about the mother. And a cousin called me. She had a first cousin right here that she never saw. Imagine! The mother told her Maris was in an automobile accident. “But I knew she killed herself,” the cousin told me. She wanted to know all she could. I told her all I knew. It isn’t much. Once she was at the NEMLA convention with me. We drove home together. I was trying to help her think what she could do with herself now that her appointment was over. Frankly, all during that time last spring she was being a pain in the butt. Don’t get me wrong, I liked her. But she had a one-track mind. Job, job, job.
Claire
I heard at school that no one claimed the body. How could that happen? I was horrified. I called the De- partment because I knew there was a mother and that brother she told us about who was a lawyer, the one she never talked to. She must have been terribly disturbed not to have anything to do with anyone in her family. I couldn’t find out anything. I knew they were holding something back. Oliver should have done something. I called the morgue and talked to the person in charge—is that the coroner?—and found out the mother had already been there. I real- ized later I didn’t know how she died. I tried to get you but you weren’t home. I thought you would have known, that someone would have been in touch with you (no one had and I didn’t). I didn’t even know her that well but it was devastating to think of her as an unclaimed body in the morgue. I felt so guilty.
Sure, she wasn’t really a friend. The closest we ever got was when she asked me for a letter of recom- mendation. And then the conversation was really strained. She could be almost obsequious. She said she knew it was asking me to go to a lot of trouble, that I was busy with the baby and my book, but
could I possibly write to Oliver and say she should have a permanent job? I had heard the negative stuff about her teaching, that she wouldn’t meet the class sometimes. She had run-ins with students who other people thought were really good. I did what she wanted. I wrote a letter for her. I just wrote about her well-roundedness as a scholar, her articulateness. I did think she was smart. I didn’t want to lie but it was
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“If someone turns up somewhere out
of the blue, knowing no one, revealing scarcely anything about her life before, what can you make of her? As if she were being born again into this strange city, this scholar’s life, gypsy scholar, we all were, l joked, we adjuncts.”
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