O' Artful Death - By Sarah Stewart Taylor Page 0,3
and liked to come and watch her teach. They’d met their freshman year at college and, with the exception of the three years Sweeney had been in England at Oxford, had both stayed in Boston. Since returning to America almost a year ago, Sweeney had been appointed an assistant professor in the History of Art and Architecture Department and published a book on Victorian death rituals and representations called The Art of the Grave: Death and the Victorian World. The book had enjoyed some modest success: an NPR interview and a quirky and complimentary review in The New York Times Book Review. Its success had gotten Sweeney her job and made her the most disliked member of the department. Her colleagues found her area of specialty overly broad and decidedly lowbrow, and they were envious of her mainstream success. She knew her chances of getting tenure were almost nil, but she loved her students.
Toby, for his part, had made a career of graduate school. He was forever trying to finish his novel—a Generation X roman à clef long ago called promising by a beloved writing professor—as well as his seemingly interminable Ph.D. thesis on an obscure American poet named James Milliner, and would turn from one to the other at sixmonth intervals, announcing each time to his exhausted friends that he had finally decided to commit to whichever project it was. The problem, which Sweeney was always trying to identify for him without hurting his feelings, was that he didn’t know whether he wanted to be a writer or an academic. So he continued on being neither exactly.
“If you look here, you’ll see what I mean about the skeleton,” she told the class, pointing to the head of a jaunty-looking Death who leaned against an urn on a gravestone up on the slide screen. “Anyone want to guess when this is? Brendan, would you like to give it a stab? No pun intended.”
“Close.” Sweeney grinned at him gratefully. “1750s. A cemetery near Concord. Remember the skeleton and now, look at this one.” She pressed the “ahead” button on the projector controls.
Up came a medieval fresco, a resurrection scene with a skeleton lurking in the background.
“Skeletons have been used as memento mori symbols in art as far back as the Greeks and Romans, who displayed them at feasts as a reminder that they were mortal and ought to enjoy life while they could. Skeletons were reproduced on drinking cups and in floor mosaics, things people saw and used every day.
“Skeletons and skulls and crossbones were common until the end of the eighteenth century,” she went on, “when they were replaced by the more euphemistic images—cherubs, soul’s heads and the like. These images came to stand in for the more macabre ones. If you think for a moment about someone walking through a cemetery, looking at the stones, you can see what the difference would have been between say an eighteenth-century one and a Victorian example.”
Unless, she realized, you were talking about the stone she’d just seen in those photographs.
Sweeney glanced up at the clock. It was eleven.
“Well, that’s it. We’ll finish up in January. Thank you, everybody. Have a great holiday and safe trip to wherever you’re going. I’ll see you in a month or so. Remember to keep reading in Genetti and start thinking about your final paper topics.”
“Hey, prof,” Toby said when everyone had filed out of the room. “Good class.” He looked the way she pictured him when she hadn’t seen him for a while, skinny as one of her skeletons, his cherubically curly black hair too long and completely unarranged. She felt a surge of affection as he shrugged out of his black leather jacket and moved his wire-rimmed glasses aside to rub the bridge of his nose. With his pale skin and dark Italian eyes, he’d always reminded her of a goofier, geekier version of the nubile gods in rococo paintings.
“Thanks.”
“By the way, which poor member of the Smith class of 1945 gave up her clothes for the cause?” He cast a disapproving look at her outfit.
“What?” She looked down at her pleated skirt and belted jacket. “Don’t you think it’s cool? I think it’s a Balenciaga knockoff.”
Toby didn’t say anything. He tended to date girls who wore fashions that could be found in current fashion magazines.
“And what’s that around your neck?”
“Oh, look.” She showed him the small gold and black coffin, inhabited by