A Virgin Hand

        by

Joe Hughes
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           When the young graduate student wrote with his impertinent proposition, I had already achieved the height of what my worst critics would have called an outstanding career.  I had for several decades been a tenured professor at one of the oldest and most respected universities on the East Coast, one almost universally acknowledged as the most beautiful “academical village” in the world, designed by Thomas Jefferson; and I had written important works on my principal subject matter, the works of William Shakespeare.

            I grant that my work specifically on Shakespeare’s Sonnets, the subject matter the presumptuous youth wished to discuss, was insubstantial, not in the same league as the lexicographically exhaustive volume by Stephen Booth or the inventive study of Helen Vendler.  But I had written An Appreciation of the Sonnets which might with honor sit on the same bookshelf as those.  And although I knew some of my detractors considered me a bit pompous, the greater number – not knowing me as well, I must acknowledge – considered that the opinion I held of myself was in keeping with that of the world at large.

            My personal situation was ennobled by the fact that I had stayed at the University where I had done both my undergraduate and my graduate work.  My longevity gave me the right, which I was presently exercising, to live for a decade in one of the Pavilions.  I had chosen Pavilion II, elegant and spacious, which ...