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About the Author: William Cobb is the author of seven novels, including the critically acclaimed A Walk Through Fire, plus his recent memoir, Captain Billy’s Troopers, William Cobb now gives us the second installment of his comedic Lily Trilogy, following Pomp and Circumstance. |
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Excerpt from Book:
Chapter One
Lily Putnam, Assistant Professor of English at Lakewood College, in her
second year of teaching, was assigned to the Yancey Lecture Committee.
The Yancey Lectures were held every other year, funded by a
generous endowment from Mrs. Willimena Loundes Yancey, Class of ’29, who
had been married and widowed five times, each time to a wealthier
husband, so she was left extremely well off.
Mrs. Yancey never attended the lectures, but they were her legacy
to the college. The
endowment was plush, so the college was able to attract well known, even
renowned scholars, from the major universities or even the Ivies.
Lily had been a lowly instructor her first year, and in a move at the
end of the academic year that surprised her greatly, she was promoted to
Assistant Professor and put on a tenure track.
“There must be some catch,” she had said to her friend Brasfield Finch,
who was the Writer-in-Residence at Lakewood.
“There is no catch, Lily,” he had said, “they are all men. They promoted
you because you make their gonads tingle.”
“How do you think that makes me feel?” she asked.
“I’m a scholar. I
don’t want to be promoted on my looks.”
“Come now, Lily,” Finch said, “you can’t change the way you look.
Oh I suppose you could get yourself up as a bag lady, but that’s
not your style. Just take
advantage of what the Creator, should there be such a thing, gave you.
You know you are beautiful and sexy.”
“But that’s not all I am,” she said, pouting.
“No, and anybody with any sense—that, of course does not extend to the
administration of this institution—knows that. So quit worrying about it
and enjoy being a professor.”
“Assistant
Professor,” she said.
Brasfield Finch was also a member of the Yancey Lecture Committee.
He dressed in what Willow Behn, another senior member of the
department—and a mentor of Lily’s—called his “uniform”:
scuffed boots, faded jeans, a
denim work shirt and a worn corduroy vest.
He sported a beard that was famous in academic circles all over
the state of Florida. It was
overgrown and bushy, so long that it hung down to his belly, and he tied
the end in a point with a piece of colorful string.
His thinning hair hung down in ringlets to his shoulders.
Finch had published a couple of moderately successful novels
early in his career; they didn’t sell well but they garnered some
positive reviews in Publishers’
Weekly and Kirkus.
Since then he had published a few short stories, all in small
journals. He had been
working on a new novel for years; Lily had read two chapters of it and
thought it his very best work.
“I think this year we should invite someone in Kinesiology,” Lillian
Lallo, who was co-chairperson of the Yancey Committee, said.
They were meeting in the seminar room on third floor Comer.
Brasfield Finch snorted. “A
glorified P. E. teacher?” he asked.
“I think not.”
“Well then, someone from the business world,” Lillian, who was a member
of the business department, said.
“We are not a corporation, Lillian,” Finch said, “we are an institution
of higher learning. We do
not need the greedy tarnish of the corporate world.”
“Mr. Finch,” Lillian said, “you are a very difficult man.”
“So I’ve been told,” he said.
Lily looked on this exchange with amusement.
She adored the older man, so much so that she had had a fling
with him the previous year.
He had a lot of gray in his hair and beard, but he was still more than
potent in his sexual apparatus, which had pleased Lily immensely.
He had broken off their fling himself.
“You need a younger man, Lily, not an old fart like me,” he’d said.
“But…” she had protested.
“Listen to me, Lily,” he’d said, “trust me.”
“But there’s really no one,” she’d said.
Lily had looked over the group of new hires this fall.
One man, new in the physics department, seemed promising; she had
gone out with him shortly before classes had started.
He had made no move toward her at all and had smoothly rebuffed
any moves she made. She
wondered if her gaydar had let her down.
The rest of the men were either married or seemed soft and wimpy,
not to her taste at all.
There was one attractive woman, new in the history department, who set
off strong vibes in Lily’s bisexual gaydar.
Lily had flirted with her at the new faculty reception at Flower
Hill, the president’s residence on campus, but had not gotten much
response. Lily suspected
that Paulette Jefferson, the dean’s butch wife—who also taught in
history—had already gotten to her.
“I think,” Finch said, “with the amount of the stipend, we could get a
first rate scholar from Yale or Harvard.
Or we could get a writer of renown.”
Now it was Lillian Lallo’s time to snort.
“Really Mr Finch,” she
said, obviously remembering and referring to the disaster of the
previous spring, when the college had invited Lenora Hart, one of
America’s most beloved writers, author of the classic
To Lynch a Wild Duck, and she
had made a drunken spectacle of herself.
So much so that the episode, when Hart was the speaker at the
annual Senior Day convocation, had put the president of the college,
John W. Stegall, III, in the hospital suffering from high anxiety and
tension; he had insisted that he was having a heart attack, but that had
been a false alarm. “Surely
you don’t want to have another
writer!” Lallo went on.
“Why not?” Finch asked. “I
warned John—I warned everybody—about Hart.
Nobody would listen to me.
Not every writer is like that.”
“I have had recommended to me this writer Pat Conroy and this poet,
James Dickey,” Shari Bulgarski from the music department put in.
“But l understand that they both drink and are of dubious
morals.”
“Dickey is a poet. I was
talking about a real writer,” Finch said, “a writer of fiction, like
Conroy.”
“And like you I suppose,”
Bulgarski said sarcastically.
“Yes. And like Charles
Dickens and William Faulkner.
At any rate, I know both those gentlemen, Conroy and
Dickey—unfortunately I was born too late to know Chuck and Bill—and you
are right. Like most penman,
they partake of the corn.
The last time the three of us were together we drank three quarts of
Wild Turkey and ate several bottles of green olives stuffed with
anchovies. We shucked and
ate four big bags of raw oysters, into the night.
It was a fun—and extremely literary—evening.”
“Ugh!” Bulgarski said.
“Mr. Finch,” Lillian Lallo said, “I am interested in neither your choice
of food and beverages nor your drunken friends.
Thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” said Finch.
“And Toni Morrison,” Lily interjected.
“She’s a fiction writer!”
It was the first thing she had said in the meeting. Morrison was
the subject of Lily’s uncompleted dissertation.
“Yes! Perhaps we could
invite Ms Morrison,” Finch said enthusiastically.
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