An American Dream (18 page)

Once again the phone was ringing. This time I answered. It was the producer of my television show. “Steve, oh boy, oh friend. How do you feel?”

“Cold as ice, Arthur.”

The answer service was also on the line. “Mr. Rojack, will you call us soon as you finish this call. We have to give you several messages.”

“Yes, Gloria, thank you.”

“Oh, Christ, boy, you’ve laid this studio in a panic. Will you take our commiserations?”

“Yes. Thanks, Arthur.”

“No, I mean, Steve,
anxiety
is loose here today. It hasn’t been so bad since Kennedy stood up to Khrushchev with the missiles. Poor Deborah. I only met her once, but she’s a great woman.”

“Yes.
Was
.”

“Steve, you must be in a state of shock.”

“I’m a little rocky, kid.”

“I’ll bet. I’ll bet. These dependencies we feel on women. When they go, it’s like losing mother.”

If Deborah were not dead, but had merely run off to Europe
with another man, Arthur would have said, “It’s like losing mother’s tit.”

“Have you seen your analyst this morning?” I asked.

“You bet on that, Steve. I was there at eight
A
.
M
. I caught the news on the midnight news last night.”

“Yes.”

His voice shifted for a moment, as if, suddenly, he was aware again of the fact. “Steve, are you really all right? Can you talk?”

“Yes, I’m really all right.”

“My analyst said I have to level with you. One of the great hang-ups on the program is that I’ve never been able to enter a relation with you. My anxieties tend to submit to social patterns rather than drive into personal focus. I guess I’ve been defeating myself before your sense of social superiority.”

“Arthur, stop this slop, will you. I’m going to scream.”

“I’ve tried to reach you six times today. I got myself up for it six times, and each time, Steve, I caught your fright-wig answer service. I’m raddled now, Steve, I’m hysterical. The pressure here this morning has been pressure cooker. The newspapers want a statement on the future of the show.”

“I can’t think about that now.”

“Baby, you got to. Look, I know I’ve always been deficient in the amenities, and think too much in terms of social response, status, public reaction …”

“Check.”

“… rather than trying to manifest some sort of false gentry’s grace for hideous moments like this.”

“You damned beggar!” I shouted at him. “You shit-face.”

“You’re bereaved.”

I took the phone away from my ear. I could hear explications running into qualifications, then the considered tone of self-examination, the scar tissue at the top of his nose where the adenoids had
been removed vibrating now with the complacency of an oboe reed. Then I heard him pause and shift—we had come to another body of the conversation.

“It’s cancer gulch down here, admittedly, but a local station suffers from tensions the networks are not subject to. You know we’ve been embattled more with your program than anything else, and now you see we’ve got a couple of cathexis-loaded projects besides yours, a real collision load. You know we’re beginning the Shago Martin show next month, it’s our integration bit, the first time we’re going to have a Negro singer doing lowdown funky
intime
duets with a white canary.”

“What’s her name,” I asked, “the canary.”

“Rosalie … I think.”

“Not Cherry?”

“No, Cherry Melanie was up for it but got axed.”

“How do you spell Melanie?”

“M-e-l-a-n-i-e. Are you drunk?”

“Why didn’t she get it?”

“Because Rosalie does her libidinal bit with Número Uno.”

“Dodds Mercer Merrill?”

“Dodds, our boss Dodds, that roaring faggot, believe it or not. He makes the chick scene from time to time.” Arthur giggled. “You know what he said to me once, ‘It’s all friction.’ ”

“And he’s putting his girl Rosalie in with Shago Martin?”

“Dodds is gone on black men, boy. Don’t you dig these things?” He paused. “Stephen,” he went on in a level voice, “my analyst gave me a formal verbal directive not to get sloughed in talking to you. The point of this conversation has still not been engaged. We’re in difficulties, boy.”

“Why don’t you just say the show will not be on the air for a short period.”

“Steve?”

“Yes.”

“Remember you once said Marx said, ‘Quantity changes quality’?”

“I remember there were fifty letters complaining I quoted Marx favorably.”

“This is one of those times. The quantity of publicity, and the contingent innuendo …”

“That’s good, boy. That’s corporation lawyer.”

“Steve, it’s not that anybody thinks you gave Deborah a shove. Christ, I don’t. I stood up to Dodds for five minutes today telling him you were essentially a sweet guy with a brilliant mind, a latent genius, and if you had a personal problem or two, well you weren’t the only man on television who was known to tipple a bit and chase hump. But that didn’t crack ice. I’ve never seen ice like the ice here this morning. A morgue. A polar morgue.”

“A polar morgue.”

“Dodds said the critical factor is this: no audience is going to trust a man whose wife takes a leap.”

“Check.”

“See what I mean? No audience in the world.”

“I see.”

“I could cry, Steve.”

“Check.”

“It was a great program, Steve.”

“Nice to be associated with you, Arthur.”

“Bless you, baby, for saying that. I dig, now I dig the anxiety this conversation gave me in advance. It was a cancerous demand that was made on me to have to do this to you.”

“Bless, Arthur, bless.”

“Yeah.”

“So long.”

“Ciao.”

The phone rang. It was the answer service. The messages were
not as numerous as I had expected. There was a request from the head of the Psychology Department to call him, there were indeed five calls from Arthur, three calls from three different newspapers, several from good friends I wanted to talk to and did not care to talk to, and a request from Barney Oswald Kelly’s secretary to telephone Mr. Kelly at his suite in the Waldorf Towers. There were no calls from any of Deborah’s friends, nor were there any from the friends I had supposed we might have in common. I had never had much illusion that Deborah’s friends were ever the least divided in their loyalty, but the absolute silence at this moment seemed to deepen their silence in my apartment. “Gloria,” I said to the operator when she finished, “do me a favor. Call the Waldorf Towers and make an appointment with Mr. Kelly. Tell his secretary I’d like to see him at seven-thirty tonight. If the time isn’t good, call me back.”

“All right, I will, Mr. Rojack, of course I will … and listen, Mr. Rojack …”

“Yes.”

“The girls here all want to say that they feel with you in your tragic loss.”

“Oh, thank you, Gloria, it’s good of you to say that.”

Was this how the French had felt when the Nazis invaded the Maginot Line from the rear, that they must lift their guns from their concrete emplacement and turn them around? I had a knowledge I must not stop making telephone calls until I was ready to leave.

I dialed the head of my Department. “Dr. Tharchman,” I began.

“Stephen,” he said, “I’m awfully glad to hear from you. I’ve been so worried. I can’t imagine a more heinous occasion for any of us, poor man.”

“It’s been difficult, Frederick. As you know, Deborah and I have not been very close for a while, but it’s been an earthquake, yes.”

“Just Godawful, I’m sure.”

There was a silence between us.

“I suppose the university has been bombarded by the newspapers.”

“They’re termites,” Frederick said. “I really believe they’re termites eating at the very substance of Western civilization.”

The second silence was definitely lame.

“It’s good of you to call, Stephen. I appreciate your consideration.”

“Actually, I wanted to. I don’t mind being on the phone.”

“Stephen, as you know, I’m not a very religious man, but I went to chapel this morning. I wanted to say a prayer for Deborah.”

I could seen his thin gray Presbyterian conscience taking him through the morning rain. He had met Deborah just once at a faculty dinner, but she had charmed him utterly as a demonstration of what she could do for me.

“Well, Deborah was religious, as you know,” I said now, “and perhaps she heard the prayer.”

Now we were both embarrassed. I could feel him smarting to reply, “Good God, I hope not.”

“Dr. Tharchman, I know we have to talk about practical matters, and I think under the circumstances, I’m the one who must bring it up.”

“Thank you, Stephen, we do have to talk. You see, it would help if the university could give just one simple statement to those damnable termites. What I’m afraid of is they’ll start to talk to the professors and, God help us, the worst of the graduate students. You know how reporters are. They look for the married men with the beards.” He searched his throat for clearance. “I won’t pretend, Stephen, that I’ve been enraptured with the pure tenor of your ideas, but what you quite properly have not been aware of is the particular protection I’ve tried to set up about you. I hate to think of the way you could be presented. One professor called this morning, I won’t tell you his name, he insisted that one of his doctoral candidates
who had taken the Voodoo seminar with you had the idea—I’m afraid I have to tell you this—that you had been administering voodoo rites to Deborah. For some time.”

“Good God.”

“It’s enough to depress one about the nature of a faculty. High scholarship, innocence, and an absolute fever.”

“I never knew I was talked about that way.”

“Stephen, you’re a living legend.” The dry little voice stuck an instant over the last two words—discipline, envy, and decency were the separate protagonists of his character. I was liking Frederick for the first time. He had come in some years ago from the outside (from the Midwest) to be made head of the Department, and he was considered pedestrian, good for keeping the Ph.D. mill a Ph.D. mill. Nonetheless, it must not have been easy for him to grind out his decent portions of salt and meal for each of us. Good old Protestant center of a mad nation. I could hear his fingers drumming on his desk.

“Well, Fred, what do you suggest?”

“The first question is whether you feel up to taking your classes immediately. I should think you don’t.” His voice closed that gate all but perfectly.

“I’m not sure,” I said. “I need a week to think.”

“Right there is the difficulty. We must say one thing or another to the papers right away. Mass communication breeds in a vacuum.”

“But, Frederick, I can’t decide today.”

“Well, I don’t see how you can.”

“But I think work may be what I want.”

“That’s what I don’t know. I’ve thought about it all morning. If you were teaching organic chemistry or statistics, I’d say, ‘Plunge in. Work to the exclusion of all else.’ But your courses are personal. You have to use yourself.”

“Nonsense, Fred, I’ve been teaching for years.”

“Nonsense—no. Magic, dread, and death as the center of motivation—it’s
not the sort of subject to give you peace. I should think there’d be an awful strain in the classroom. You might break under it.”

“You mean some angel of the Corporation is afraid I might bring a bottle to school?”

“Don’t you agree we take as good a stand toward the trustees as any university you could name. But we can’t despise them
altogether
, can we?”

“Fred, do you realize what a conversation this is?”

“I don’t know if I’ve had one like it before.”

“Really,” I said, “what could you lose?”

“It’s not measurable. A university can absorb scandal upon scandal. Then, one too many, and it’s incalculable what could happen.” He coughed. “Steve, this is academic. I can’t believe you want to go back to work right away.”

“But if I do? Fred, what if I insist? What will you do?”

“Oh, if you insist, I’ll be forced to go the president, and tell him it’s your right to work.”

“And what will he do?”

“He will overrule me.” Church humor. I heard a delicate little flutter in Frederick’s throat.

“Since I have tenure, I suppose I might be forced to go so far as to sue the university.”

“Oh, you wouldn’t do that,” Frederick said. “The case would be disagreeable in the extreme.”

“What are you getting at?”

“I don’t want to talk about it any further. Your wife’s death is sufficiently tragic without beginning to mention the unhappy … the dreadful … the
ambiguous
aspects of it all.”

“Oh, no!”

“Steve, this is the most unendurable conversation I’ve had with anyone in years. We’ll never forgive each other for this one.”

“We won’t.”

“I’ve managed it abominably. Accept the reality, accept the
reality. See it from the university’s point of view. Perhaps we feel we’ve done our honorable best to pay the indefinable price and, yes, perhaps gain the even more indefinable benefit of having a creative intelligence in the Department who inspires most respectable people with a deep-seated sense of uneasiness. Consider that not every university would have put up with that television program of yours. Steve, can’t we just leave it that this is a bastard of a day for everybody?”

Silence.

“All right, Fred. What do you want?”

“Take a leave till the beginning of the fall semester. We’ll announce your bereavement and retirement from active teaching duties for an indefinite period. Then we’ll see.”

“Fred, somehow you’ve won this one.”

“I haven’t, believe me.” Then he said quickly, “Steve?”

He was in a hurry to move on. His voice faltered for the first time. “Steve, I can’t imagine anything more inappropriate, but I must ask you this. Perhaps you don’t know it, but my wife is a religious cultist.”

“I didn’t know.” But I should have guessed. I could see Gladys Tharchman up in Vermont for the summer, a purple dress, silver-rimmed eyeglasses, white hair, and her dowager’s hump over a thin body.

“She subscribes to some of your ideas.”