The Realm of Last Chances (8 page)

But then Patty reached up and pulled down a round tin like the ones fruit cakes came in at Christmas. “Ever eaten hoop-cheese wafers?” she asked.

“I don’t think so.”

Patty pulled the top off, and the tin was filled with crumbly orange things that emitted a pungent smell. “My mother makes stuff like this,” she said. “Want to try one?”

“What’s in them?”

“Margarine, flour, red pepper, Rice Krispies and hoop cheese.”

“What’s hoop cheese?”

“Something they sell in country stores down south.”

“That’s where your mother’s from?”

The other girl nodded. “Prices Fork, Virginia.” She started to replace the lid.

“Wait,” Kristin said, because she sensed that she’d behaved exactly as Patty expected, showing revulsion at something unfamiliar; if that was what she expected, it must have happened before. “Let me try one.” As though it were a slimy creature she’d found beneath a rock, she seized a wafer between thumb and
forefinger and, despite the awful odor, popped it into her mouth, where it instantly dissolved. A moment or two passed before she realized how wonderful it tasted. “I like it,” she said.

“Are you joking?”

“No. Really.” She took another one.

“Well,” Patty said, choosing a couple for herself, “I actually like them, too.”

They carried the tin upstairs to Patty’s room and finished off the wafers while watching
Bewitched
. During the show they reached agreement on a number of crucial points: though her character was obnoxious, Agnes Moorehead had attractive features; Dick Sargent was a better Darrin than Dick York; and Esmeralda was a poor substitute for Aunt Clara. By the time Kristin’s parents got ready to go home, she’d made arrangements to spend the night.

Over that long summer they became closer and closer, roving South Market Street after pooling change to buy candy and sodas, wading in the shallows of Penns Creek, tossing a Frisbee on the banks of the Susquehanna so George, the Connultys’ clumsy Airedale, could chase it down and bring it back rimed with slobber. Three or four times a week, they took turns sleeping over at each other’s house, where they fell asleep side by side after midnight, often with library books open on their chests. Both of them, it turned out, loved to read. In Kristin’s case, that made sense because her parents taught English and her mother had named her after the heroine of her favorite novel,
Kristin Lavransdatter
. Mr. Connulty, on the other hand, had an engineering degree, and you never saw his wife open a book.

The Connultys had met at Virginia Tech. Or, to be more accurate, in the waiting room at the Montgomery Regional Hospital, where he was waiting for them to revive a fraternity brother whose pulse had all but disappeared after he emptied a fifth of Four Roses. Patty’s mother, who was only nineteen
then and worked at something called the Dixie Sweet Shop, was waiting for them to release her father, who’d lost a finger in a pulp-mill accident. “She took one look at me,” Kristin had heard Mr. Connulty say, “and thought she knew all there was to know. I was a drunken frat boy, pure and simple. Probably from Northern Virginia, with parents who had plenty of money but not enough vision to send him to William and Mary, Washington and Lee or even UVA.” That his background was different from what she’d imagined evidently weighed in his favor. His father had died at Saint-Mère-Église on D-day, when his parachute deposited him into a house set on fire by a pathfinder’s flare. He and his two brothers were raised by their mother, who taught first grade in Fairfax. He attended Tech on an academic scholarship and, while not at the top of his class, did well there. He earned the money for his frat fees by performing brake jobs three afternoons a week at Firestone. “I convinced her I was worth a second look. Took a lot of hard work, plenty of elbow grease, but it was the best thing I ever did. And though I hate to admit it, I’ve always been glad her father lost that finger.”

A self-made man:
that was what Kristin’s dad said Mr. Connulty was, on one of the rare evenings that summer when neither girl visited the other, the Connultys having gone to Virginia to see their relatives.

“What other kind of man is there?” her mother asked.

Her father was drinking his whiskey, and the television was on, the sound turned low as it so often was in those days. On the screen, President Nixon was finishing a speech, his lapels bunched up under his chin because he’d raised his hands above his head to flash the victory sign.

“There are plenty of other kinds,” her father said, reaching for his Tullamore Dew.

“So just name one.” Her mother had a book in her lap and
continued to look at it as if she were reading, though Kristin knew she wasn’t. When she was reading, she didn’t talk or even listen to what anyone else was saying.

Her father also had a book in his lap, Leon Uris’s
QB VII
. He closed it and laid it on the floor. “Take me, for instance,” he said. “I’m not a self-made man.”

“So what kind are you?”

“Well, I’m the kind who follows a well-trod path.”

“Really?”

“Or maybe I should say a worn path. Aren’t you always trying to make your students enjoy that Welty story?”

“I don’t try to make them. I try to help them.”

“Whatever. Anyhow,” her dad said, “
my
father taught school. And what do I do?” Rather than wait for her answer, he said, “And look at you. I married a beautiful, brilliant woman who also teaches school, just like my own mother did. In other words, I didn’t wander off the path into the forest.”

He drained his glass, got up, walked over to the sideboard and poured himself a second drink, bigger than the first. Kristin had never seen him do that before. He turned his back to her and her mother, pulled aside the curtain and gazed at the Connultys’ house, though no one was there, not even the dog. They’d taken George with them to Virginia.

“If Tom Connulty had followed in his father’s footsteps, he would’ve joined the army about five years ago, and probably would’ve died in some rice paddy.” He let the curtain fall, went back to his chair and sat down, the cushions sighing beneath his weight. “And he wouldn’t have married a woman like Sarah.”

Her father didn’t say why he wouldn’t have married Mrs. Connulty, and her mother didn’t ask. Instead, she looked at her wristwatch, set her book aside and announced dinner would be ready soon.

Whenever Kristin spent the night over there, Patty’s mother made them special treats: homemade potato chips with green
turnip dip, fried pickles with blue cheese dressing, buttermilk pies, pecan cakes with praline glaze, pear fritters. She’d sit at the table with them, always saying she’d try just one of whatever they were having. Then she’d leave them alone. The next morning she’d fix elaborate breakfasts of chicken and waffles, cheese grits or sweet potato pancakes. After they finished eating, she’d ask what their plans were, or if they wanted her to take them anywhere, and if the answer was no she’d wash the dishes and do some cleaning and then turn on the soaps.

At first Mrs. Connulty didn’t talk a lot when the two families convened for one of their frequent dinners, but as that first year turned into the second and she and Kristin’s mother began to do their grocery shopping together and even took a trip to New York City to see
Jesus Christ Superstar
, she became a lot more verbal. Occasionally, though neither of Kristin’s parents ever commented on it, at least not in her presence, Mrs. Connulty messed up her grammar. “They gave it to Tom and I,” she might remark, instead of “Tom and me.” Or she might ask, “Where was you?” She sometimes slipped and put an
r
on the end of a word like “Alabama.” During Kristin’s grad school days in North Carolina, she frequently noted similar verbal mannerisms in shops and convenience stores, and each time she remembered Sarah Connulty.

In perhaps the first adult-level assessment she’d ever offered of another person, she told Patty, “Your mother is the kindest, most
decent
person I know.”

Assessment—the drawing of distinctions between the acceptable and the unacceptable, the accomplished and the inept, the useful and the expendable—was the main thing on her mind when she walked into the office that morning to find Donna waiting, her laptop bagged for the Power Point presentation, her gaze flitting toward the wall clock. They had a tenure and promotion workshop scheduled for nine a.m., and it was
already three minutes past. “We’d better hurry,” her assistant said. “It’s a good five-minute walk to the Olsen Center.”

“They can’t start without us, can they?”

“No. But there’s such a thing as punctuality.”

“I know there is. There’s also such a thing as traffic, and my bus proved it this morning.”

Heading across campus she made an effort, as she had each day, to engage the older woman in small talk. “How’d your husband’s checkup go?”

“Fine.”

“Was his blood pressure lower?”

“A little.”

“And the problem with your grandson’s teacher—did that get resolved?”

“They moved him to another class.”

Finally, she gave up, and they covered the last hundred yards in silence.

The auditorium was an institutionally grim bowl with tiered seating for around eighty people. They walked in to find no more than eighteen or twenty faculty members there, most of them sitting by themselves, as if in implicit acknowledgment that going up for tenure was like dying. It could only be done alone.

While Donna connected her laptop, Kristin welcomed everyone and reminded them that she’d just arrived and was still learning the ropes. “I’m sure I’ll make some mistakes along the way,” she said, “but I’ll do my best to correct them. If at any point you have a problem with that, I hope you’ll first discuss it with me rather than someone else. I promise to do the same.” Then she introduced her assistant, and judging from the looks on the faces of those assembled Donna hadn’t made many friends in this crowd.

Kristin began her presentation with a list of dates on which probationary files were due to departments and deans. For ten
or fifteen minutes she covered the role of mentors, stressing the importance of maintaining constant communication with them, and then she went over the three areas in which tenure-seeking faculty would be evaluated, pointing out that accomplishments in teaching, research and service must be properly documented. “A good file is thorough,” she said. “At the same time, padding obscures real achievement. If you attend a conference in D.C., you don’t need to include a napkin from the Mayflower Hotel to prove you were really there. A program listing your subject or topic will do nicely.” She enumerated recent changes to the tenure and promotion guidelines, noting that the publication requirement had been raised from two juried articles to three and that the service requirement had also been raised from one committee to two.

When she’d finished, she asked if there were any questions. People fidgeted as they looked around the room to see if anyone else was going to speak first, but eventually a hand went up.

“Yes?”

The guy was around forty, with copper-toned skin and the trace of a British accent. “How does the administration justify requiring more of faculty,” he asked, “at a time when it’s cutting support for research and travel?”

The question was neither unreasonable nor unexpected. But the truth—that the administration believed it could raise standards because there were fewer jobs, and professors were desperate—could not be plainly stated. Nor could the inconvenient fact that while the publication requirements were still absurdly low for any institution claiming university status, the administration had raised them largely to contain costs, on the assumption that more than a few would fail to meet them and would quickly be replaced by cheaper junior faculty. “We’re hoping that increased productivity,” she said, “will bring increased external support to all the departments. Right now,
as a result of the stimulus package, there are already more funds in some areas.”

“So the recession,” he said, “is a positive development if one views it in the proper light?”

A titter passed through the room. Rather than becoming angry, she was starting to feel at home. She’d been here before. “It depends on what we make of it,” she said. “After all, one of the most productive periods this country ever experienced followed on the heels of the Great Depression. At this particular school, the enrollment jumped dramatically, new positions were created and the campus expanded to twice its former size.”

“In other words, this is really an exciting time to be alive?”

“It’s always better to be alive than not.”

He didn’t respond, so she took a couple more questions and, seeing no other hands raised, thanked everyone for coming and said good-bye.

While she waited for Donna to disconnect the laptop, the man who’d engaged her walked down the aisle in the company of a slim blonde who’d been sitting beside him. He offered his hand and, as she reached out to take it, introduced himself: “Robert Dilson-Alvarez,” he said. “Hyphenated. And this is Gwendolyn Conley.”

She shook hands with Conley, who nodded and mumbled hello without quite making eye contact. Though Kristin hadn’t recognized either of them, she knew their names. Assistant professors in the history department, they’d be coming up for tenure in the next few months. She’d read through all the probationary files, flagging the ones she thought looked troublesome, and neither Dilson-Alvarez nor Conley seemed anything less than a sure bet. He’d published a book and several articles, and she already had two articles out and a third accepted. His teaching evaluations were some of the strongest in the school, hers spotty but acceptable. They’d each done plenty of service.
“Nice to meet both of you,” she said. Then, looking directly at Dilson-Alvarez: “Did I answer your questions satisfactorily?”

He laughed. He was a handsome man, tall, with a chiseled chin and cheekbones and wavy black hair that seemed as if it parted naturally. “You answered them like an administrator,” he said.

“Well, that’s what I am.”

“But not what you started out to be.”