Free Styx & Stone by James W. Ziskin Page A

said.
    “Does Mr. Sanger make you thirsty?” asked Gigi, winking adorably at Bernie. “May I offer you a drink?”
    “Now that’s a gentleman, Bernie,” I said.
    “Geez, I would have asked,” he said, waved a hand in the air, and walked away.
    Then Hildy Jaspers appeared. She was a gin drinker. She confessed that her Achilles’s heel was martinis.
    “Let’s make it a gin-tonic,” Gigi said to the bartender. “She has to be careful not to get drunk in front of the profs.”
    Sean McDunnough mixed the drink, heavy on gin. He watched me as he poured, his red-iron face immobile except when he winked at me.
    “So you’re a chandelier swinger?” I asked Hildy.
    “No,” she said, sipping the drink the bartender had handed her, “I’m more likely to say something stupid.” She paused. “Or take off all my clothes.”
    “Eleonora,” called a strong voice from behind me. “I thought it was you.”
    “Professor Saettano,” I said, holding out a hand. He had to switch his cane to the left hand to shake. Hildy and Gigi drifted away. Franco Saettano was the doyen of Columbia’s Italian Department, a legendary Dante scholar, and the man who had hired my father in 1933. I knew him best of all the Columbia faculty. “How are you?”
    He attempted a shrug, which came off more like a quiver. “I’m all right.”
    “I didn’t see you at the service,” I said.
    Saettano drew some saliva off his lips with a quick swig of air. “I don’t like such ceremonies,” he said. “Reminds me of my mortality. And I hate listening to Victor Chalmers’s oratories. He can’t say hello without injecting a pedantic metaphor.”
    Unlike Bernie Sanger, Franco Saettano didn’t have to worry about others overhearing his opinions on the department or its chairman.
    “But how is Abraham?” he asked, his voice suddenly soft.
    I didn’t mind giving him the details; I knew he cared. He said he would try to visit my father in the coming days.
    “I live in Riverside Drive,” he said. “The Village is far for me.”
    Professor Saettano eased himself into a chair against the wall, taking the ponderous weight of eighty-six years off his tired legs, and we talked about Ruggero Ercolano.
    “He was an able scholar,” said Saettano. “Not brilliant, but qualified. A pleasant young man.”
    “I hear he liked the ladies.”
    “There was that, yes, but he was good. He’ll spend some time among the lustful in purgatory before passing to paradise.”
    “What about my father?”
    Saettano frowned. “Abraham has time still here on Earth. But his sins are of pride, not of the appetites.” His eyes smiled gently.
    “How are the arrogant punished in Dante?” I asked.
    “Of course, there are many arrogant souls in the Inferno and Purgatorio ,” he said. “Some are seared by a fiery rain, while others are burdened with heavy stones around their necks. The punishment, you see, is rooted in a kind of divine irony: the horrors of each soul’s damnation—or time passed in purgatory, as the case may be—are somehow fit for the sins of the lifetime. For the arrogant, who hold their heads so high in pride, the weighty stones force them to bow before God.”
    “Stones around their necks?” I asked. “Fitting for a prideful professor named Stone, wouldn’t you say?”
    Saettano smiled.
    “Have you heard a rumor about my father challenging Chalmers for the department chair?”
    “Of course,” he said. “There was talk. Ruggero approached me to know how I would vote. I said Abraham would have my support if he wanted it. But in the end he decided to leave administration to Victor. For all his faults, he is nevertheless a good administrator.”
    “Don’t you think it strange that Chalmers was the one who found Ercolano’s body?”
    The old man shrugged.
    “After midnight on a Saturday?”
    “That is unusual, yes,” he said, bouncing his cane lightly on the linoleum floor. “But these things always have an explanation. The