Professor J. Taylor Washburn had a B.A. from Penn and a Ph.D. from Columbia. He was an art historian. He taught a graduate seminar in low-country realism, and was the chairman of the Fine Arts Department.
I learned all of this in the first five minutes of our conversation. I also learned that he had once been married to a young woman named Hilda Gretsky.
“Was she a student here?” I said.
“No,” Washburn said. “I met her at a gallery.”
“In the city?”
“Yes,” Washburn said, “downtown. One of my teaching assistants was having a show. Sadly, it was not very good.”
Washburn appeared to be about sixty, with wavy snow-white hair worn longish. His complexion was red, and his thick white mustache was carefully trimmed.
“When were you married?”
“Nineteen eighty,” Washburn said.
“How long did it last?”
Washburn looked out the window at the open quadrangle in the center of the campus with the redbrick Georgian library at one end and the redbrick Georgian student union at the other.
“Two years,” he said.
“What occasioned the breakup,” I said.
He kept looking out the window.
“She asked me for a divorce,” he said. “She told me she’d been having an affair with a man named Van Meer.”
“Must have been hard to hear,” I said.
“Yes.”
I took a picture of Heidi from my pocket and put it on his desk.
“Is this Hilda Gretsky?” I said.
He looked at the photograph.
“Yes,” he said.
“Are you aware of who she’s become?” I said.
“Yes.”
“Do you know when she began to call herself Heidi?” I said.
“When I knew her she called herself Heidi. The name on her birth certificate and her marriage license was Hilda, but she always hated the name, and always introduced herself as Heidi.”
“How old is she?” I said.
“She was born in 1959,” Washburn said.
“She from New York?” I said.
He shook his head.
“ Dayton, Ohio,” he said.
“Why did she come to New York?” I said.
He stopped looking out the window and turned to me and smiled without much pleasure.
“To make her fortune,” he said.
“Doing what?” I said.
“Marrying well,” he said.
“Starting with you?”
“I suppose,” Washburn said. “One achieves, in some circles, a certain, ah, tone, I guess. Also, in addition to my academic earnings, there is a considerable trust fund. My father was aggressive in banking.”
“Prestige and money,” I said. “Good start.”
“Yes.”
“Love?” I said.
“She was not unkind,” Washburn said.