Fortunate Lives (15 page)

Sincerely,

Jeanette Atwell

Department of Philosophy

But now that summer was here, Martin disregarded the committee’s regulation. Jesse Hall was almost empty and, besides, Martin
liked Duchess’s company as he strolled through the grounds of the school. He thought the grounds should be teeming with teachers
with their dogs, teachers with their children, teachers on bikes. He thought men and women who wanted to impart knowledge
should be available, visible, along all the paths, around every turn.

After his own graduation, Martin had discovered that he had loathed almost every minute of his years at Harvard, where he
had learned a good deal but had been taught very little. And he had infuriated his graduate director, a distinguished man
of letters—a scholar—at the University of Virginia, when he took the man’s advice to enter academe, but at the first opportunity
opted to teach at a school that claimed to cherish undergraduate teaching with an ardor equal to, if not greater than, that
with which it embraced publication. Early in his career, in fact, Martin had turned down three separate offers from large
and distinguished universities with prestigious graduate programs. He knew his zealousness about teaching was regarded by
his colleagues at best with affectionate tolerance and at worst with suspicion, cynicism, and disdain. But he also knew that
many of those men and women still harbored what he believed was the foolish desire to be famous people within their designated
sphere. He accepted their condescension and regarded them, in turn, with some degree of pity.

Even Dinah thought that his devotion to teaching was
sometimes unthinking, that he was likely to be ill-used by the very institution that he served. Martin, however, had seen
that happen to some of his colleagues, and he was cautious in his affection for the place. He was simply pleased for his own
sake to be walking across the campus at a leisurely pace while Duchess nosed into a hedge, or stopped to examine a tree, or
looked longingly after the complacent squirrels that chattered at her from the high branches.

As he had set off with Duchess in the late morning, Dinah had rounded on him. “Are you going to the office
today
? You’re taking that silly dog? Well, for God’s sake, please be home in time to eat this soup that the whole world has gathered
to make in my kitchen.”

“I have to meet Vic and Owen Croft to explain the summer assistant’s job at
The Review
. I think it’s something Owen can handle. I won’t be long.” He was trying to get Duchess to hold still while he attached her
leash, and he saw her ears go flat when she heard Dinah insult her. He always felt compelled to defend Duchess against Dinah’s
occasional scorn, although within the household the dog was entirely devoted to Dinah, following her up and down the stairs,
back and forth across the kitchen, always underfoot. Martin had never claimed that Duchess was a dog of noble character, but
he also took care to point out that the dog’s fearfulness and various neuroses required a certain degree of intelligence.
“Any fool can be brave,” he had said that morning in Duchess’s defense.

“I think she was just weaned too soon,” Dinah replied.

One of the pleasures of Martin’s life was the long summer days he spent working at
The Review
offices while Duchess sprawled across the cool linoleum in luxurious security. Vic was usually in the adjoining office, but
the rest of the building that housed the English and Philosophy departments was almost empty. Now and then the sound of someone
else engaged in some sort of studious work would
filter down the staircase—a file drawer rasping open, a pencil sharpener, the Xerox machine. These sounds were as comforting
to him as Dinah’s house was to her or David’s garden was to him.

And occasionally he or Vic would come across something brilliant, a piece of fiction, an essay—like Netta Breckenridge’s.
Her prose was elegant, her thesis stringent, and her subject of interest. He had known only that she was a Fennel Doyle Scholar
in her first year of a two-year appointment when he sent her a letter of acceptance for her article. Because of the ferocity
of her prose, he had made a guess at who she might be during a faculty meeting. For several weeks after that, Martin had taken
care to nod agreeably at a very tall, handsome, dark-haired woman with a severe face and a mildly aggressive nature.

One day he had been standing in the ten-item express lane at the grocery store, waiting to pay for a half-gallon of milk,
when this same woman met his eye steadfastly as she approached him. “I’m in a frightful hurry!” she had declared, with a trace
of a British accent, and he stepped back to allow her to go ahead of him, only to be dismayed when she trundled forth a cart
full of groceries.

The check-out girl looked up to object, but began ringing up the items with a sigh when she met the woman’s implacable gaze.
When Netta had finally shown up in the office toward the end of the semester, Martin had assumed she was a student applying
for the summer job which now, in fact, he and Vic had offered to Owen Croft. Martin had been enormously relieved at Netta’s
unprepossessing nature, and she further endeared herself to him by not being the fearsome woman of the express lane. He remained
irritated in retrospect that he had so docilely surrendered his place in line to that mysterious person.

As he entered Jesse Hall today, though, he began rehearsing his greeting to Owen, the way in which he would carefully construct
a channel of amiability between Vic and
Owen, in order to protect Owen from Vic’s cynicism. But Owen had arrived ahead of him, and Martin had an unexpected sense
of suffocation—really as though there were not enough air in the place—when he came around the corner of the corridor and
saw Owen sitting, half turned, on the arm of the old wing chair in Vic’s office. Owen twisted in his direction, and Martin
nodded in acknowledgment, stopping in the doorway and fighting an unnerving queasiness while he unclipped Duchess from her
leash.

Owen continued his conversation with Vic. “Hey, I think I can help you out, Professor Hofstatter! I’d like to do it.” He was
mocking himself slightly.

Vic leaned back with his hands clasped behind his head, swinging his swivel chair slightly from side to side, enjoying the
banter.

“We’d count on you to pretty much use your own initiative to answer these letters,” Vic said, getting down to business now
that Martin had arrived. “I’ll tell you how we usually handle it. Mrs. Krautz sorts the correspondence into fairly rough categories.
We get letters from a variety of people that are essentially just ‘letters to the editor,’ but some of them require a reply.
We don’t publish any letters in
The Review
, so until Penny Krautz is back you’d better let us see all of those. There’s no way you could know which ones need to be
answered. But most of the answers fall into a sort of formula. How do you want to work this, Martin?”

Martin had pulled a wooden chair away from the wall and was sitting catty-corner between Vic and Owen. He couldn’t help but
think that Owen’s wide-eyed expectancy looked a little stale, as if it were calculated.

Larry Croft had come to Martin in despair this spring. Larry had been embarrassed but desperate, and Martin had agreed to
try to help Owen get a grip on his life. Larry continued to believe that Owen’s emotional problems were due to his having
been involved in Toby’s death, and that any kindness that Martin could see his way clear to extend
to Owen would be the only thing that might help him heal. Martin was willing to give it a try, but he had let several weeks
pass before telling Dinah about Larry’s request.

Martin began explaining the job to Owen. “Penny and I have about a half-hour conference every morning to run over the general
answers to queries or comments.” He looked hopefully at Owen, and Owen nodded. Martin was encouraged and went on. “There could
be four or five letters that I could tell her to reply to with the ‘Thank you very much for your suggestion, blah, blah, blah…
We’ll certainly consider it in the future.’ Do you see what I mean?”

“Sure,” Owen said, “but do you have some copies of her letters that can give me a general idea of the tone?”

Vic and Martin exchanged a brief, satisfied glance, and Vic picked up three files of letters from his desk. “I pulled these
for you,” he said to Owen, “but they’re on the computer, too, so you can just alter them to personalize whatever form is suitable.”

“Okay, okay. That sounds good,” Owen said, growing animated. “But say some letter comes in that doesn’t have a precedent.
Look! Maybe I could do something like this. I could mark anything that I need to consult you about with green pencil, anything
that seems to be a ‘Thank you very much’ in red, and a query that will be turned down in blue. I could leave them on your
desk in the evening, and you could look them over in the morning before I type them up to send out.”

“Great. That’s a good idea,” Martin said. “Don’t worry too much about typos and so forth. Helen LaPlante will type them from
your printout. We don’t like to send out letters that look as if they were composed on a computer. Even when we print something
‘letter quality,’ it looks less personal than Helen’s standard typewriter.”

“Oh, yeah! That’s good! That gives it a sort of personal
touch, doesn’t it? I mean, it’s like you guys are actually answering the letters yourselves.”

Owen’s interpretation made Martin uncomfortable, but Vic grinned. Martin realized that they
were
, of course, practicing a kind of deception, but he had never thought of it as a clever stunt—a slick idea—as Owen clearly
did.

Owen had been sitting with his arms lightly clasped around his torso and his long legs stretched out in front of him, crossed
at the ankles, but he dropped his hands to his sides and collected his feet beneath him as he bent toward Vic. “Well, this
sounds good to me. I really do think it’s something I’d enjoy doing. Helping you out until I can get things sorted out again.
I’ve talked to the registrar. Bradford and Welbern’s admitted me as a special student. I’m planning to finish my degree next
year, so I’ll be around, and I could always help you out if Mrs. Krautz is away. But it would be great for the rest of the
summer.”

Martin was unable to listen to Owen without feeling uneasy, and even physically his was a contradictory presence. Owen was
tall and lanky and sometimes oddly menacing in his angularity, with a curious half smile and a habit of ducking his head in
conversation so that his words tumbled down his long frame. Any listener was forced to lean forward and gaze up at him, as
though in supplication, in order to catch a phrase. And anything he did say had an edge to it, slipped this way and that in
intention.

At other times, though, he was endearingly gangly, with a subdued, self-deprecatory attitude in all his gestures, as if to
illustrate that he was making every effort to rein himself in so as not to take up more space than other-sized mortals. And
then, when he spoke, he was careful to meet the eye of his audience, and whatever he had to say was straightforward. At moments
like that everything about him was sympathetic.

Martin realized that he wouldn’t need to mediate between Owen and Vic, and Martin should have been relieved,
but instead he was unaccountably apprehensive. Owen was still good-looking, with the beginnings of lines crinkling at the
corners of his green eyes, but he had an almost tenuous presence. It was not so much that he seemed vulnerable as that he
appeared to be already slightly bruised, a bit weathered for a twenty-three-year-old, as though he were the blunted edge of
something that had once been quite sharp.

Judith and Larry Croft had come to Dinah and Martin in abject despair in the middle of the year following Toby’s death, when
Owen had been asked to leave Swarthmore. The school had been alarmed by Owen’s alternately manic then utterly withdrawn behavior,
and the Crofts felt sure he was suffering from the aftermath of having unwittingly caused such a tragedy.

“I wish they wouldn’t involve us,” Dinah had said to Martin then. “I
do
know they’re frightened for him. And I know it’s hard for them to ask
us
….” Her voice broke and she had paused. “I think they expect more than I can manage,” she said, finally.

That first year, though, Dinah’s several meetings with Owen had oddly enough served to dispel, a little, the fog of constant
distress that enshrouded her. Her surprise at feeling even a tiny bit of sympathy for Owen had served its purpose for a while,
and her incessant sorrowing had lessened. She had even begun to break free of it for moments at a time.

Martin had noticed, however, that the better she got to know Owen, the less she cared about him one way or another. While
she might pity him, she didn’t like him. Dinah left Toby’s death out of the equation. “Owen peaked at about age sixteen,”
Dinah had said several years ago when she had finally washed her hands of him. “It’s a clear case of ‘early bloom, early rot.’
I always think of those people as having deteriorating personalities, but usually they just become boring. There’s something
a little scary about
Owen.” She thought that Owen was doomed by his own nature, and therefore, as time went by, he simply didn’t interest her much.

But now and then, when she knew Martin was going out of his way on Owen’s behalf, her husband’s insistence on such generosity
of spirit wounded her in an obscure way. She said his continuing association with Owen was a forfeiture of judgment, a denial
of pain, even an abdication of responsibility. And this morning she had said that the idea of his working with Owen on a day-to-day
basis was a perfect blueprint for disaster.

What she didn’t know was that when he had found out about Owen’s initial breakdown at Swarthmore, and every time he heard
about Owen’s continuing problems, Martin envisioned himself in midair, launched at Owen in the damp gymnasium, tackling him
and encompassing him with terrible guilt and responsibility.