Frankenstein Sundae, 77

On August 18, 2001, Betty wrote to tell me that she’d returned from London—mostly, she said, she’d spent long hours at the libraries. She also offered me a very odd question: She wanted to buy my copy of the diary of Dr. John Polidori, Lord Byron’s personal physician who was present that Frankenstein summer in Geneva, 1816, a young man who later wrote The Vampyre (1819), a book that has given us Dracula and Edward Cullen and Bunnicula and innumerable other Undead “heroes.”

I wrote back about an hour later—a long email about our trip to Memphis and the Nashoba site. I told her, too, that while we were there, we visited the National Civil Rights Museum, a facility that includes the Lorraine Motel, where Martin Luther King, Jr., fell to his assassin on April 4, 1968. It was a private museum, I wrote, and one of the most moving experiences I’ve ever had. Virtually everyone else visiting was black, and as we slowly proceeded by displays on the KKK, on Selma and fire-hoses and police dogs, etc., I have to say I felt powerfully ashamed.

I told her I’d keep an eye out for the Polidori book—and then segued into a little report on our recent visit to Stratford, Ontario, to see the Henry plays of Shakespeare. (We are still going to Stratford, every summer.)

I also shared with her this bit of news: I think I told you [did I?] I will be back in the classroom this year—and we start the year with Hamlet! I don’t have any classes until after Labor Day (we’re a boarding school …, but I have meetings starting soon, and I’ve already been … gasp! … working on lessons.

Yes, in the fall of 2001 I would start teaching full-time again. Although I’d retired from public education in January 1997, I’d done some teaching at Hiram College’s Weekend College (enjoyed it a lot—but adjunct pay is pitiful), and now—with all my Shelley research debts piling up like tailings outside a mine, I figured it was time to head back to earn back a little of the bread I’d cast upon the waters of scholarship.

And so I returned to Western Reserve Academy—just about three blocks from our home—where, long ago, I’d taught for two years (1979–1981). The school was close enough that I could walk (which I did) or bike (which I did). I would quickly fall in love with my students and my colleagues and ended up staying not just for a year or two. But ten. Only failing health drove me home again to stay.

In my file I do not have a reply about this announcement from Betty (was there one? did I fail to print it out?), and the next exchange I have is from a few days later (the 21^st), and it comprises only some perfunctory business about Mary’s original elopement with Bysshe and Claire Clairmont in 1814.

Two months would pass before our next communication. A pattern was forming.