Straight Man (37 page)

When Phil Watson returns, he looks like he suspects what I’ve been up to. “I’ll call you tomorrow with results of the IVP,” he says. “Meantime, try not to worry.”

“Can’t help it,” I say, though it’s not precisely worry I’m feeling. “This is my favorite organ we’re talking about. And I’m an intellectual.”

Phil snorts at this. “It’s the favorite organ of all intellectuals,” he assures me. And he’s never even met my father.

When I drive back out to Allegheny Wells to help Mr. Purty, I find he’s ignored my advice to walk away. The U-Haul trailer itself is nowhere in evidence, and when I hit the remote for the garage door opener, I see that the boxes containing my father’s books have been neatly stacked along the back wall of the garage. There must be a hundred of them. Can Mr. Purty have done this job all by himself? It’s possible that Julie helped, I suppose, but I’ve worked with Julie before, and I know that having her help you do something is a lot like doing it alone. The boxes are stacked three deep, six feet high, and they completely block the door from the garage into the kitchen. Which is okay, I guess, since there’s no longer room in the garage for my Lincoln, a car that barely fits when I inch it right up against the wall. I try not to think about the symbolism of all this—that my father’s books, the physical manifestation of his intellect—have cut me off from my own house.

Julie is off somewhere, which leaves me alone with Occam, who is strangely subdued, as if he too were present during my visit to Phil Watson and is now contemplating the meaning of the “asymmetry” discovered during my rectal exam. When I let him out onto the back deck, instead of doing his usual frantic laps he goes over to the railing, gives the external world a leery sniff, returns to the sliding glass door, lies down with his head on his paws, and sighs. I pour myself a small
glass of iced tea, hit the play button on the answering machine, and settle onto a barstool at the kitchen island, sipping the tea cautiously, aware that any liquid I ingest will have to be expelled.

When the machine stops rewinding I’m treated to my mother’s voice, vexed as always when she speaks to our machine, an experience she so detests that she will usually hang up rather than utter a syllable. “Henry?” she says. “Are you there?” A pause, five full beats. “Are you there? If you’re there, pick up. It’s me.” Another pause, then a muttered, “Damnation …” Followed by the sound of irritated hanging up. Then she’s back. This time no hello. “Once again you disappoint me, Henry. If you’re well enough to leave home, you’re well enough to stop and say hello to your father. Don’t call back. I’ll be out most of the afternoon and I don’t want your father disturbed. He’s not well …” Again, a hang-up. Then back again. “He’s not ill, just exhausted from the move.… I can’t do all of this myself, you know.…” There’s more to say, I can tell, but not to a damn machine.

I try to imagine William Henry Devereaux, Sr., left alone in her flat. Will it occur to him there, or has it already, that he’s been delivered at last to retribution? He’s too keen an observer of life to believe in anything like earthly justice, but it must look like something pretty close to that. All morning I’ve been haunted by Mr. Purty’s description of my father bursting into tears. It may be that he has lost his mind, which would mean that destiny has played another cruel trick on my mother, allowing her to reclaim the mere shell of the man she’d been married to.

When the telephone rings, I stay right where I am, empty iced tea glass in hand, numbed by a melancholy that’s easier understood than dispelled, a sadness that my daughter’s voice deepens instead of lifting. “I’m out at the house,” she informs me, “waiting for the fucking locksmith. Nobody can, like, tell you what time they’re coming anymore. You get a morning appointment or an afternoon appointment.…”

Her voice falls tentatively, like she knows I’m here in the kitchen and is offering me the opportunity to pick up, to admit my own presence. “I thought that funny little man in the cowboy boots was going to have a stroke unloading those cartons. I figured he was a mover, but he said he was just a friend of Grandma’s. Anyway, he was too old to do all that work by himself.”

The answering machine has heard enough. It cuts her off and dutifully goes through its series of clicks and whirs, finishing up just as the phone rings again.

“Rude machine,” my daughter continues. “I’ll be back later, after the locksmith. Maybe we … well, I’ll talk to you then, I guess.”

But she’s not finished. Her voice feels nearer now, more intimate, than when she was talking about Mr. Purty. “There’s something you should know about Russell, Daddy,” she says. “This isn’t all his fault. He didn’t … shove me, exactly. You probably already know that. Like, who am I kidding, right? There’s something not … right with me … I’ve known it forever. I just get so …”

I’m standing at the counter now with my hand on the phone. I don’t remember getting up or crossing the room, but I must have, because here I am.

“I thought it was a secret, but I guess it’s not …”

“Julie,” I say, my throat so constricted I can barely choke out the word. I still have not picked up the receiver, and I know I won’t.

“Anyhow, don’t blame Russell, okay?”

Again the machine hangs up, and while it whirs and clicks, I stand, hand still on the receiver, staring out the kitchen window. Occam has slunk off somewhere, as if listening to Julie’s voice was more than he could bear. Besides, it’s spring and there are new gardens to root in. Over the weekend, the trees have come into full leaf, insulating us once again. From where I stand, it’s no longer possible to see Allegheny Estates II on the other side of the road, not even Paul Rourke’s satellite dish. In fact, even Finny’s ex-wife, our closest neighbor, has all but disappeared into the lush green foliage. Still, this feels, right now, like the blighted side of the road.

For twenty-five years I’ve driven through the university’s main gate and parked in the faculty lot nearest Modern Languages, but apparently I’m becoming a sneak, because for the fourth time in as many trips, I head over the mountain to campus, so that I may slip in unobserved through the rear gate. Judas Peckerwood, Back Door Man. Earlier today, if only for a fleeting moment, I entertained the idea of becoming dean via a back door phone call to Dickie Pope. What next? As I approach the campus’s rear gate, it begins raining gently, and the surface of the road becomes slippery. Just how slippery I realize only when some lunatic woman in a car with a Century 21 logo on its side panel, parked facing the wrong way, opens the passenger side door without warning and steps out into the street in front of me.

This is, however, no ordinary lunatic, it turns out when I get a good look. It’s my mother, and I slide to a stop a foot in front of her. The look of horror on the face of the realtor, her companion, testifies that she would hate like hell to lose this client. My mother, unimpressed
by my screeching tires, remains unimpressed when she looks up and sees who made them screech. She’s waited forty years for William Henry Devereaux, Sr.’s return, and she knows that God lacks the temerity to claim her in the very midst of her triumph. He’s just toying with her, through me, and she’s having no part of it. She slams the car door shut and opens her umbrella with a defiant flourish. Then she points at the two-story, gabled Victorian she’s about to enter.

By the time I park farther down the block, both women have disappeared into the house in question. I’d know which one they went in even if my mother hadn’t pointed it out to me, even if it didn’t have a For Sale sign angled crazily on the front lawn. I’d know because it’s a dead ringer for every house I lived in with my parents when I was a child. I don’t even have to go in to know what it will look like inside, or to know that it will smell damp and feel clammy.

My mother and her realtor are waiting in the foyer next to their dripping umbrellas. The realtor still looks shaken by my mother’s near miss, evidence that she’s only just met my mother if she thinks Mrs. William Henry Devereaux can be killed when she’s on a mission. In fact, Mrs. W.H.D. observes my slow, limping approach critically. “You might have helped poor Charles with all those boxes,” she observes. “Especially since he’s such a favorite of yours.”

“The abuse of Mr. Purty is not a subject I should think you’d want to open, Mother,” I warn her, introducing myself to the Century 21 lady, whose name tag identifies her as Marge.

“I hope you aren’t going to blame me for that poor man’s deluded affections,” my mother says abstractedly, attempting to peer through the inner door’s ornamental stained glass. “I may be their object, but I’m certainly not their cause.”

“You play him like a violin.”

“Nonsense,” my mother says. “We had a very pleasant weekend in New York. We ate in restaurants of Charles’s choosing. Even a truck stop on the way home. You should have seen your father trying to eat barbecued ribs, if you want to feel sorry for somebody.”

“I do feel sorry for him,” I assure her.

“He needs a new denture, and it’s one of the first things we’re going to attend to as soon as we’re ensconced.”

Marge can’t seem to find the right key to the inner door, which delay affords my mother the opportunity to observe me more closely. “Your eyes are all puffy. Have you been weeping?” She reaches up to touch my right eye.

I deflect her index finger. “Don’t be asinine. And speaking of weeping, what’s this I hear about Dad bursting into tears?”

“I’ll wait inside,” Marge volunteers, feeling, no doubt, peripheral to this strange conversation.

When she’s found the key and gone in, my mother says, in a voice intended to convey confidentiality without being actually confidential, “Your father is not in the best shape. That last woman—the Virginia Woolf one—really did a number on him.”

My mother identifies all the women my father has aligned himself with according to their academic specialties. The young woman he left her for was in his D. H. Lawrence seminar, and since then he’s taken up with a Brontë woman and a Joseph Conrad woman, before finally coming a cropper with Virginia Woolf.

“I’m convinced she was responsible for his collapse. Did you know she cleaned out both his checking and savings before abandoning him? Your father is a virtual pauper.”

She pauses to let me contemplate a world in which such a thing can happen.

“And I don’t care what they say at the hospital. He’s not over it. Not that it would do him the slightest good to remain there. What he needs is normalcy. He needs familiar surroundings. He needs his books and someone to talk to about the things that matter to him. It’s a shame he can’t resume teaching until the fall, but the timing can’t be helped.”

I blink at her. “Teach where?” I ask before I think.

“Right here, of course,” my mother explains, as if to a child. “One course per semester is not too much to expect, I think. Who’s that little man with the ridiculous name who runs everything?”

“Dickie Pope?”

“I’ve an appointment to discuss the matter with him next week.”

“I wouldn’t mention my name.”

“There shouldn’t be any need,” she assures me. “Your father’s own name carries considerable weight, as you know. And the chancellor is
an old friend. He’s promised to instruct the little papal fellow to give your father the one course. They’re fortunate to have a man of your father’s stature. He’ll have to have a designation, of course, but all that can be worked out later.”

On this note we move from the foyer into the house, where the excellent Marge awaits us.

“Ah, well, yes,” my mother says when we enter the formal dining room through two French doors. The room is lined with bookcases, floor to ceiling, and what she imagines, I suspect, is the room full not only of books but of people—the best graduate students (of which there are none on our campus), the occasional visiting poet or other dignitary (for which there is no budget), an adoring English department faculty to hang on my father’s ideas (Finny?). What she’s looking at is her own faith, and the smile that blossoms on her old face is pure vindication.

“Mother,” I can’t help but say, “you take my breath away.”

At the rear gate to the university I encounter three idling Railton police cars, as well as a campus security vehicle. My first irrational thought is that they’re waiting there to prevent my entrance, but apparently they have other business, because after I turn in, the lead car pulls out into traffic and the other three follow. In the last of these, a young woman occupies the rear seat reserved for miscreants, and as the two vehicles pass I catch a quick glimpse of her face, which is familiar, though I can’t place it. Was she among the throng of animal rights protesters this morning? Even more bizarre, that split second in which I register the young woman’s features, she seems to take me in as well, perhaps even to recognize me. Do I imagine it, or does her head turn to follow me?

I park in the far lot behind Modern Languages. There’s a red Camaro idling in the no parking zone at the rear door. Rourke’s wife is at the wheel, apparently waiting for her husband to emerge. Even with the Camaro’s windows rolled up, I can hear music pounding inside as I approach. Barefoot as usual, the second Mrs. R. has one foot up on the dash and is wiggling her toes. Another person caught in this posture might conceivably suffer a misgiving or two, but not the second Mrs. R., who smiles at me dreamily when I wave, as if she suspects I might wish to join her, take off my loafers, and compare toes.

Her husband comes out through the back door just then, studies me for a moment, and observes, “You look like shit.”

I tell him thanks, then, to my surprise, hear myself say, “Listen. Don’t misunderstand this, because I’m not after your vote. But I didn’t give Dickie Pope any list.” Why I tell him this, I have no idea, since I haven’t even given this assurance to my friends.

Rourke nods. He seems almost disappointed. “Funny thing. I believe you.”

“Okay,” I say, and for some reason I feel absurd pleasure at being able to arrive at this simple understanding with an old enemy. I feel better about it, in fact, than I’ve felt about anything for days.