Chapter 26
Fall term I signed up for three English courses, including one with Gill Holland.
Tony Abbott warned me that was a bad idea.
Gill was considered the most demanding professor in the English department.
Tony said I might not realize how much reading and writing were involved if I took three literature classes at the same time.
But the alternative was something else like chemistry or calculus, and I avoided science and math at every opportunity. Classes began the first week of September, and each of my English professors assigned a term paper. I’d never written one and had no clue how to do footnotes or anything else.
I mentioned this to Gill Holland after class, and he made the mistake of telling me he’d read as many drafts as I gave him.
I could tell he assumed that I would do as most of the students and turn in my paper at the last minute.
But he didn’t know about my phobia of missing the bus and that I was early for everything.
He received my first draft in no time, and six more would follow.
After a while I was getting back my marked-up papers with his footprints on them.
The increasingly poor condition of my endless drafts seemed an indication of his growing aggravation.
After exams and a brief fall break, I was terrified to find out how I did my first term at this very demanding college.
Professors would leave graded papers and tests in big manila envelopes taped to their office doors inside Chambers classroom building. When I snatched out the recycled term paper I’d written for Gill Holland, I was disappointed.
“I only got a B-plus?” I exclaimed in frustration. “That’s it? After all that?”
The next day as I was walking through Chambers, Gill stopped me.
“Miss Daniels, I understand you weren’t happy with my grade on your paper,” he said to my chagrin.
It turned out he was inside his office when I shot off my mouth.
I got a B+ in each of my three classes, and after that it was A’s in literature courses the rest of my time at Davidson.
My habit was to suggest offbeat projects because I hated writing term papers.
In astronomy I wrote a six-page illustrated poem on the life and death of a star.
While studying Victorian literature, I composed an elegiac poem in the style of Alfred Tennyson.
After reading Paradise Lost, I offered to try my hand at an epic.
Dr. Cole said that it might be “more involved” than I realized.
The spring term of my sophomore year, I wrote a paper for Gill Holland about The Mystery of Edwin Drood and how Charles Dickens might have ended it had he not died.
The way I deciphered the murder and who did it showed how my mind would work when writing crime novels years later.
This time Gill Holland gave me an A. Little did we know that one day that paper would be on loan for a summer at the Dickens House Museum in London. I made sure to inform Gill of that.
I thrived at Davidson, not just learning but discovering how to think.
When I’d arrived on campus my first fall, I wore a gold dog tag with nothing engraved on it.
I called myself a tabula rasa, a blank slate.
I’d never heard of William Faulkner, James Joyce, Flannery O’Connor, and assumed the Victorian novelist George Eliot was a man.
Professor Charlie Lloyd would go down a list of books, asking me if I’d read this one or that.
“What about…?”
“No, sir.”
“What about…?
“No, sir.”
“How about…?”
“No, sir.”
“Miss Daniels, I wish I’d read as little as you,” he declared one day. “I’d have so much to look forward to!”
The faculty was encouraging and attentive.
Because Davidson had no graduate school, the students were taught by the professors and not assistants.
My advisor Tony Abbott was a poet and writing a novel.
We often talked about my classes and creative efforts.
I kept Ruth Graham’s red leather journal in my dorm room, and already its pages were filling with reflections and verse.
My junior year I’d started working at Peregrine House on Main Street.
Owned by Eddie and Cindy Booker, the popular restaurant was a two-story frame building with a big front porch.
It had become my home away from home and was my only source of income.
Had it not been for the Bookers, I couldn’t have managed at Davidson.
I had a terrific financial aid package but nothing for rent, food, books.
My mother had no money to spare, and my father refused to help.
At one point I needed surgery to extract impacted wisdom teeth.
It would cost $500 and Dad wouldn’t pay it.
I called Calvin Thielman, and the church gave me the money.
Every now and then Ruth would send me a letter with a hundred-dollar bill tucked inside.
When I tip hundred-dollar bills today, it’s my way of paying her back.
The original Peregrine House doesn’t exist anymore but used to be the best place in Davidson for sandwiches and pizza.
I spent far more time there than on campus, my employers and coworkers extended family.
Our staff was small and during peak times the tempo was crazy.
I’d tie on my red apron and wait on tables, learning early on that those with the least money often were the most generous.
Tony Abbott wanted me to graduate with honors in English.
But I’d have to write a thesis. It would be considerably longer and more involved than a term paper, he warned.
I proposed the book I had begun the summer of 1976 after getting out of the hospital.
I explained that I called it a novel, but it really wasn’t fiction.
The story was about my family and everything that had happened in my life so far.
As Tony and I were having this discussion, I noticed the striking-looking English professor directly across the hall.
Charles Cornwell and I hadn’t met. I don’t recall ever seeing him before that late afternoon, but I couldn’t stop staring, electrified and unsure why.
I watched him put on a long dark wool coat and a Russian cap.
His black hair and sharp features reminded me of Dr. Zhivago.
I asked Tony about him and learned that Charlie was in his late thirties and a bachelor.
Because of his dramatic style and comradery with students he was one of the most popular professors on campus, his classes in huge demand.
He was considered quite dashing in his tweed jackets with leather elbow patches, roaring around in his butterscotch-colored Triumph TR6 convertible.
As I listened, I recalled seeing the sports car, wondering whose it was.
Tony had only high praise for Charlie but warned he was aloof and seemed all too happy being a bachelor.
Tony sensed my interest and gently discouraged it.
At my first opportunity I began to take Charlie’s seminars that typically were no more than six students.
I found any excuse to spend a moment with him, asking questions even if I knew the answers.
Now and then he’d invite the seminar students to his apartment in Jackson Court off Concord Road at the edge of the campus.
On December 15, 1977, he hosted a Christmas party for my class. I brought him a bottle of sherry, and “loved being inside his private world,” I wrote in my journal. I admired his antiques and oriental rugs, my allergies acting up when his two Siamese cats slinked in.
I noted that he lived “a very controlled life. Everything is tasteful and meticulous—very unusually so.” If anyone understood control or the lack of it, I did. “I was the last to leave and wished I did not have to go at all,” I added.
During Christmas break my junior year I returned to Davidson more than a week early.
None of the other girls I lived with were back and I had Henderson House to myself.
One night while I was hammering away on my typewriter, I got a creepy feeling.
I sensed a presence. A man was watching through the ground-floor window to the right of my desk.
When he realized I saw him, he ran off. I didn’t notify the police and should have.
Instead, I called Mom and she promised to pick me up the next morning.
I made sure the doors to Henderson House were locked, and barely slept that night, terrified the man was going to break in.
He brought back memories of Appalachian Hall and my fears about patients walking into my room.
I returned home long enough to borrow Jim’s .
22 revolver, tucking it in my tote bag. I knew it was against the rules to have weapons on campus, but that was too bad.
No way I was returning to Henderson House unless I had a way of protecting myself.
But when I got there, two other girls were back early to work on projects.
I wasn’t alone and didn’t need the gun. I unloaded it and made the mistake of entrusting it to Mom. The next day it was rainy and foggy. I took several long walks on campus wondering why I felt unbearably anxious. I couldn’t work or sit still, so unsettled I was coming out of my skin. I called Mom.
“Please come get me,” I said.
“Why are you calling me?” she asked weirdly.
“I need to come home.”
“Why?” Her voice sounded the way it did when she wasn’t well.
“Please, Mom.”
Several hours later I climbed into the car, and during the foggy drive home she said she’d spent the morning preparing for her suicide.
She carried my brother’s revolver into the house and reloaded it, placing it on the table next to the sofa.
Turning on the hi-fi, she started playing her favorite records.
When she’d listened to every one of them for the last time, she was going to shoot herself.