Eating Crow (15 page)

“As for Jeffries being by himself, they’ve invoked their right under Schenke’s third sub-law to nominate their own representative.”

“And that’s Jeffries?”

“He’s chair of the committee so it makes sense. They’ve specifically said they didn’t want it turning into a circus with big delegations on both sides. They want the apology one-on-one, you and Jeffries, no one else, and that’s what we’re doing.”

I scribbled more notes on my pad. “I really think I ought to go see Schenke, you know. To get his thoughts on how to approach this. And to pay my respects.”

There was a sharp intake of breath from the group, which made me look up.

“Bad idea,” said Satesh, too quickly.

“Really no need,” said Jennie.

“A waste of your time,” Satesh added.

I looked from one to the other and back again. They smiled reassuringly at me and then, uneasily, at each other. I placed my notepad down on the table in front of me. “I need a little time to think on my own,” I said, and I slipped my pen into my inside jacket pocket. The meeting was over.

I
heard the Professor’s house before I saw it. He lived outside the town of Olivebridge on the edge of the Catskills, a couple of hours’ drive north of Manhattan, and as I approached the address my secretary had obtained for me from his publishers, the narrow wooded lane echoed with the sound of breaking glass and over-revving car engine. I was so distracted by the noise that as I turned into the drive, I almost went bumper to bumper with another car coming out. A middle-aged woman, graying red hair pulled back into a ragged ponytail, her lips pursed, wound down her window to talk to me. I leaned out of my own open window toward her.

“You going in there?” she said. She looked tired and seemed eager to get away.

“I was planning to, if it’s the home of Professor Thomas Schenke.”

She looked back over her shoulder as if to remind herself of where she’d come from. “Oh sure, you’ve found the place.” She turned to me and said quickly, “Listen, honey, do yourself a favor. Turn the car around. Go home. Be kind to yourself.”

I looked up the sloping gravel drive at the wooden house with its shady veranda and view out over the treetops. An old plum-colored Cadillac was parked up next to a tightly packed store of logs. It looked peaceful.

“I think I’ll pop in for a moment,” I said. “I’ve driven a long way to get here.”

“If you take my advice, you’ll drive even further to get away from this place.” She blinked and let her fingertips tap lightly on the steering wheel.

“I’ll back up so you can get out,” I said, and she nodded gratefully.

“Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” she said, and she turned out of the drive so fast her wheels screeched on the tarmac. I parked up next to the other car, stepped around the remains of two smashed beer bottles on the front path, and climbed the steps to the front door. I pulled on a chain mounted by the door that rang a small bell above my head. There was silence.

I called out his name. Still nothing, save for a creak from behind the solid wooden door. I squatted down so I was level with the letter slot and said his name again, quietly. “Professor Schenke …?”

“Has the bitch gone?” The voice was harsh, as if its owner had been shouting. He seemed to be sitting on the other side of the letter slot.

I looked back at the empty drive. “The lady who was here?”

“Lady? She’s a witch.”

“She’s gone.”

“Good.”

“Professor, my name is—”

“What are you doing here? Another fucking apology groupie? Here for absolution?”

“Absolution? No. I’m—”

“You want to hear me say sorry, don’t you? That’s what they all want.”

“I’m Marc Basset, Professor. We spoke briefly yesterday.”

“Basset? Basset?” He paused. “The shyster UN-patsy Basset? That Basset?”

“You told me to come.” I was still hunched down by his letter slot and my knees were beginning to ache from the strain.

He said, “I did?” and sounded genuinely surprised.

“Perhaps if you opened the door I could introduce myself?” There was the sound of locks being turned and safety chains being slipped from their holding place. I pulled myself up. A man flung open the door, but turned and walked away into the house so quickly that I didn’t get a good look at him.

“I told you to stay away,” he shouted back at me as he slipped into the shadows. “I tell them all to stay away.”

“I’m really sorry if I misunderstood you, Professor Schenke. I asked if I could come to see you and I thought you said you’d be here, which I took to mean I could drop by.” It is true he had slammed the phone down after that, but I had assumed his closing words to be an invitation from a busy academic lost in his own thoughts.

“I’ve changed my mind,” he barked from somewhere deep inside the house.

I followed his voice to a study at the back. Its shelved walls were packed with books and most of the floor space was covered by tottering piles of yellowing journals. Light filled the cramped room from a wall of windows that presented a view of the tree-carpeted Catskills, and the sun caught motes of dust and old paper that hung in the air. Schenke was sitting at a desk behind a copy of that day’s
New York Times
, the broadsheet held full spread in a way that reminded me immediately of my father.

“Professor …?”

He dropped the paper. “What do you want?” He was a wiry man in his fifties, and everything about him—his clothes, the bags beneath his eyes, his wild wavy hair—hung down, as if the force of gravity affected him more than others. His steel-framed spectacles were pushed up atop his long forehead, and when he jutted his head toward me the lenses scattered the sunlight about the room, which made me squint.

“I was wondering whether we could discuss the practicalities of the international apology?” I said. It sounded pompous, but it really was the point of the trip.

“You want to know about practicalities? I’ll tell you about fucking practicalities. There’s no hot water ‘cause the boiler’s blown, my car’s up shit creek, and now that witch of a cleaning lady”—he waved toward the front door—“has walked—”

“I heard breaking glass.”

He stood up, leaned across the desk at me, and shouted, “She made me throw the bottles at her!” He sat down and started reading the paper again, laid flat across the desk. “It was provocation,” he muttered to himself. “That’s what it was. Undue provocation. That’s what I’ll tell ’em. Call me a slob, will she?”

“Maybe I chose a bad day. Perhaps I’ll go now and we can sort out another time when—”

“Hah! What’s a good day? Define a good day for me, O Mighty Chief Apologist. The man who knows everything. Where did they find you anyway?”

“Well, I—”

“Some snotty jerk profiting off my hard work.”

“I don’t think that’s fair. I’m only trying to do a job that—”

“Another lazy little shit like all the rest of them, leeching off me. Sucking me dry.”

“Professor Schenke, I don’t see how I can be accused of doing anything to you.”

“You’re like the rest of them.” He leaned back in his chair and picked up the paper to hide behind. I watched him in silence. He did not move. All I could see were his two wrinkled thumbs pressing so hard against each outer edge of the paper that it began to tear. I decided to try another tack.

“You know, Professor, you’re not at all what I was expecting.”

He snapped the paper down. “What were you hoping for? Snow-fucking-White?”

“Jennie, he’s vile.”

“We did try to keep you away from him.”

“He’s paranoid. He’s raving.”

It was the next morning and she was sitting on one of the sofas in my office, her hands clenched nervously in her lap. I paced up and down in front of the window, my gaze fixed on the view of the river.

“I really don’t think you should worry about Professor Schenke.”

“He seemed so angry about everything.”

“Yes, anger is one of his problems. I believe he came up with the first draft of his apology laws as part of the homework for an anger management course he was sent to.”

“Sent to?”

“By the courts. He was the subject of a restraining order. It was a while ago, though.” She crossed one leg over the other.

I stopped and stared at her. “You’re telling me that the founding father of Penitential Engagement is mentally unstable?”

“It doesn’t undermine the quality of his scholarship.”

“No?”

“Absolutely not. His blueprint is still valid. It merely means the Professor isn’t the right man to be involved in the process. Which is why you’ve got the job.”

I turned back to look at the East River, sparkling beneath an early summer blue sky. I watched the tugs drag themselves through the water and the smoke billow from factory chimneys in Queens on the other side and thought about this furious man in his mountain aerie, raging at the world through the mocking sunlight. Angry at everything and nothing at all. Furious with me. And then retiring to his desk in his book-infested study to write works of great moment.

That was when it struck me. Going to see Professor Schenke hadn’t been a mistake. On the contrary. It had been exactly the right thing to do. By discovering what a monster he was, I had given myself the freedom to pursue my apologies however I saw fit. I wasn’t beholden to Schenke. He wasn’t my master and I wasn’t his slave. The mystery had gone. It was as if he had ceased to exist.

I turned to Jennie and said, “Let’s get the team together again.”

She threw me a wink. “That’s my boy.”

Later that day Joe Phillips came up from Psychology, still looking like a Gap billboard, all loose denim and unironed plaid, clutching hours of videotape of Lewis Jeffries III in action: giving lectures, taking meetings, milking cows …

“Milking cows?”

“Yeah, sure,” Joe said. “He owns a few purebred Friesians down at Welton-Oaks. Makes his own cheese and butter, apparently.”

“He wrote a book about it,” Satesh said, flipping through a pile of paper. “Here it is.
The Deepest Furrow: An African-American on the Land.
It was, er—hang on …” He read the summary quickly. “It describes it as a, quote, polemical memoir reappropriating for African-Americans their traditional role as custodians of the land rather than merely slave labor working upon it, etc., etc., unquote. Published four years ago.”

Joe nodded as if he knew all this already. “Jeffries is a complex chap, Marc, who has managed, quite remarkably, to keep a foot in both urban and rural black American culture while maintaining an impressive profile in academic circles. He still teaches law at Xavier in New Orleans, regularly publishes, both books and in journals, sits on god knows how many committees …” He was leaning on the top of the huge flat-screen television in the sofa area of my office, the picture fixed on a close-up of one of Jeffries’ hands clutched about an engorged bovine teat. He stood up and pointed the remote at the machine. “Anyway, if we just move this along …” He wound the tape forward. “Here’s some very precious footage shot just before the substantive talks at the Georgia statehouse last year.” We all leaned in toward the screen.

“Okay, what I want you to look at here is the straight back, the arms not crossed but open and laid on the table, palms up, head bowed slightly here … and again … in deference to the other side of the table without indicating self-abasement. Either this chap is as honest and open as they come or he’s read a lot of books on how to appear so. Look now … he reaches across to take something from that small bowl in front of him, nuts or something …”

I watched carefully.

“And instead of tipping the bowl toward him, which is a closed-off, exclusive gesture … there we are …”

Beneath the lights in the room the white porcelain of the bowl gave off a sudden glare on the screen which, just for a split second, obscured the whole image. This business with the bowl and the nuts intrigued me. It looked so very precise.

“… he tips it to one side slightly. He can still see what’s in there, but he’s not excluding anybody, he’s—”

I stood up. “Joe, hold the picture there.”

“Marc, I don’t think we need to—”

“Freeze the picture.”

I studied the screen. For all the nodding I had done and the insightful questions I had asked and the oohs and the aahs, nothing anybody had said to me had moved me an inch closer toward a viable vehicle for the apology. Perhaps there was something in this nut-bowl thing.

I said, “I know what he’s doing.”

Joe looked at the television. “He’s choosing nuts. He’s tipping the bowl and choosing nuts.”

I shook my head. “It’s far more specific than that. He’s not just choosing nuts. He’s choosing
specific
nuts. He’s picking out all the macadamias and who can blame him? I’m a sucker for them too. Macadamias are fabulous things. Could you, you know, start the tape again … There—see? Pick, pick, pick. Out go the macadamias.” Triumphantly I said, “The man likes his food. That’s what pushes his boat out …”

I sat back down in my seat and turned to Jennie, but I could see from the look on her face that she had already got it. “Fried chicken, potato salad, gumbo …,” she said.

“… macadamia nut pie …”

She tipped her head to one side. “Is there such a thing?”

“Who cares, Jennie? If you can make pecan pie you can make macadamia pie. We’ll find him a recipe. Or we’ll invent one.”

“A menu of African-American soul food. The real thing.”

“Exactly.”

“We’ll need cookbooks.”

“Lots of them.”

“And a big house with a huge prep kitchen. Marc, it will be a triumph.”

“I will apologize to him for the appalling crimes of slavery over a lunch like he’s never had.”

“I said you were the right man for the job,” Jennie said. “I just knew you were right.” She reached over and squeezed my hand. Around me the rest of the team was nodding enthusiastically, even Will Masters. They broke into a round of applause and I felt a warm glow of anticipation break over me: I was only days away from the huge emotional release of a real apology.