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Authors: Ralph McInerny

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BOOK: Last Things
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Once rival liberal arts colleges established by religious orders great and small had formed a chaplet around the city of Chicago, but if they vied for students they cooperated in other things, among them dances that provided opportunity for meeting the possible partner of one's life. Coeducation had come to these campuses late, during the tumultuous sixties, the decade in which they began the drift from their original moorings. It was not that they repudiated their religious past; it simply became less and less relevant as nuns and priests disappeared from the staffs, lay presidents were appointed, hiring was done on a basis indistinguishable from that of other lesser institutions, which now were enjoying a buyer's market as more and more people poured out of graduate school into a shrinking job market. In these circumstances Andrew Bernardo, with a mere master's and not even an ABD, all but dissertation with class work for the doctorate completed,
might have been grateful for his tenured position at St. Edmund's, but in the manner of academics he engaged in pro forma grousing about the students, the salary, his class load, and the fact that he had to share an office with a colleague who seemed never to bathe. This necessitated keeping the window cracked even in the dead of winter and having a small air cleaner beside his desk whose steady hum had the added advantage of discouraging conversation. Foster was a slovenly giant who chain smoked and declaimed Shakespeare aloud at the least provocation, favoring the historical plays. No student visited him twice, if so often.
“Tell him to take a bath,” Andrew urged Anne Gogarty, the chair of the department.
“You're as close to him as anyone.”
“That's my complaint.”
“It would come more easily from you than anyone else.”
“It should be an official demand.”
“It's not in the manual.”
The faculty manual was a constant point of reference, the basis for grievances that could lead to the formation of a committee of the faculty senate and months of talk followed by inaction. Bathing by the faculty was not a requirement. That Foster was a philosopher, given to unintelligible mumbling about possible worlds' ontology, seemed only fitting. The man could not keep his own body clean, but he spoke of the universe as a personal possession. Several times Andrew had edged close to the sensitive topic.
“This room is so hot.”
“It's that machine you insist on running all the time.”
“That has a cooling effect. And it cleanses the air.”
Foster lit a cigarette from the burning stub of another. Andrew never complained of Foster's smoking; the clouds of exhaled smoke did something to neutralize the effect of being downwind from his aromatic office mate.
“Do you ever exercise?” he asked Foster on another occasion.
“Not on purpose.”
“You should, you know.”
“What kind of a should is that?”
“How many kinds are there?”
A mistake. Foster launched into a lecture on the modalities of the deontological. Physical exercise seemed to be a mere hypothetical imperative. Andrew lauded the new wellness center that had been built by Alloy, the president, among whose achievements was to declare the campus both a smoke-free and nuclear-free zone. But faculty offices had been grandfathered, and Foster was free to puff himself to an early grave.
“The pool is magnificent,” Andrew said. “Swimming is a marvelous tonic.” The thought of Foster clouding the chlorined water of the pool was ambiguously attractive.
“I nearly drowned when I was a kid.”
Was that the origin of his dread of water? “No one ever drowned in a shower.”
“I thought you said pool.”
“Who says pool says shower,” Andrew replied boldly.
“Who is who?”
“The Marquis of Queensberry.”
“You are being facetious.”
That was as close as he had come to recommending personal hygiene to Foster. Of course Andrew had to meet his students elsewhere, usually at a table in the cafeteria. There he sat on the morning that he had received an early telephone call from his Aunt Eleanor.
“Jessica intends to write a novel about the family.”
Jessica's small success as a novelist was the heaviest cross Andrew bore. He taught creative writing but had published only
two stories, in quarterlies that had never made it through their first year. From sophomore year of high school he had dreamt of being a writer, but by senior year he had published nothing in the school magazine, the
Penna,
except one short essay on Scott Fitzgerald. Meanwhile, Jessica, two years his junior, dashed off sonnets, a verse play, and short stories that caught the attention of the
Chicago Tribune
because their older brother, Raymond, had sent them to the literary editor. She began to receive inquiries from literary agents. Andrew adopted a condescending attitude toward his sister's writing. She herself seemed to regard her own success as a bit of a joke. She had published a series of poems the first lines of which were taken from famous pieces: “Shall I compare thee to a summer's day”; “She lived among untrodden ways”; “Out of the cradle endlessly rocking.” It seemed a species of cheating, trading on the achievements of others. The one beginning “Where the bee sucks, there suck I” was vetoed by the faculty advisor, an effete chemist who fancied himself a renaissance man and dismissed Hemingway as a primitive. Andrew longed to be a writer like Hemingway or Fitzgerald, a celebrity, his name on everyone's lips. Now he had to contend with the fact that the name Bernardo seemed owned by Jessica so far as writing went.
“You try too hard,” she said to Andrew when she found an unfinished story of his.
“Writing should not come easily.”
“It does for me.”
Jessica was beautiful; even Andrew saw that. Thick yellow hair, an olive complexion, full lips, and almond eyes that mesmerized even in dust jacket photographs. She did not need fiction in order to be popular, yet she had never married. Sometimes he felt that she had been more affected by Raymond's defection
from the priesthood than anyone, even their parents.
“I'd become a nun if I could find a convent that wasn't out of Boccacio.”
Hope flared up in him. If she had a vocation, perhaps to an enclosed order, she would put away her pen and fade from the field. He had come to believe that her success was the main cause of his writer's block. Jessica scoffed at the idea of writer's block.
“Just do it, for heaven's sake. It's just words on a page, one after the other.”
He had pored over her novels in search of flaws.
Where No Storms Come,
her first, had been a bildungsroman, but in it she had invented a family as different from their own as imaginable. Her second,
We Waited While She Passed,
was set in a nursing home and drew on a summer job as a nurse's aide. He told her that in its way it reminded him of
The Poorhouse Fair.
She didn't know it. She claimed to read very little.
“Updike.”
“What's Updike?” She gnawed on an imaginary carrot and gave an imitation of Bugs Bunny. Perhaps he was meant to be a critic, Edmund Wilson rather than Fitzgerald. He imagined a monograph on the fiction of the twenties and thirties but despaired at the thought that it had been done already a thousand times.
Across from him at his table in the cafeteria sat Mabel Gorman, a student whose prose had the polish of someone twice her age. She was an unlovely girl, thick black hair that rose wildly from her narrow head, a unisex body that seemed more limbs than torso. She sat sideways in her chair like a pretzel, legs crossed, hugging herself, blowing hair out of her eyes.
“I like your story,” Andrew said.
Her smile was her best feature, toothy and full, radiant. “Thank you.”
“I think you should submit it for publication.” Andrew was
the faculty advisor for
Scriptor
, the renamed student literary annual.
“I have!”
“You have?”
She had sent it to
The New Yorker.
Jessica's first published story had been in
The New Yorker
. It turned out that this was no accident.
“I didn't realize she was your sister.”
“Bernardo is not that common a name.”
“But someone so famous!”
His cross bit into his shoulder. It was cruel that even his own students looked past him to Jessica.
“That's a tough market to crack.”
All his own submissions to
The New Yorker
had come back, in Thurber's phrase, like a serve in tennis. He had the sudden certainty that Mabel's story would be accepted. It was a soulful vignette about a young girl who continued to collect dolls into womanhood, the drama subdued, pregnant with suggestion, a story that clung to the imagination long after being read. Andrew had studied it, wondering what the secret was. Was he doomed to become the pupil of his pupils?
“Your class is the best I have ever taken,” Mabel said, her smile coming and going uncertainly.
Students were given to unsolicited praise, usually when finals approached, but Mabel seemed to be speaking from the heart.
“What else are you taking?” Did he want to know what the competition was, in what field he was first? Mabel's smile disappeared.
“Do you know Professor Cassirer?”
“What do you think of him?”
Her eyes widened, she looked over both shoulders, she leaned toward him. “Is he crazy?”
It is a vice peculiar to the academic to elicit criticism of colleagues from students, but Mabel poured forth her view of Cassirer unprompted.
“Do you know he mentioned you in class?”
“Did he?”
“I looked up your stories and read them, just to spite him. I liked them.” She might have said more, but she was honest. “I asked him what he had written. I looked that up too. It's all gibberish.”
Mike Pistoia had suggested that anyone who did such violence to literature as Cassirer could be physically violent too.
“Andrew, he would hate us no matter how we voted.”
“It's all bombast. Besides, what could he do to us?”
“Don't get me started. How's Gloria?”
Later Andrew would see his colleague's question as a warning. Now to Mabel Gorman he said, “So you don't think my stories are gibberish.”
“Oh no. I can see why you are such a good teacher.”
This was heady indeed, cushioning the surprise that she was awaiting word from
The New Yorker
about her story.
 
 
Later in his office he wrote a line, “A sundial on a cloudy day,” and stared at it. Like the opening of one of Jessica's early poems it seemed to cry out for a second line and a third. He would send it to Poetry. But the second line would not come. Foster was an oppressive presence. Andrew wrote another line, “Life in an olfactory,” then pushed his notebook away and thought of Aunt Eleanor's call.
“So what?” he asked when she expressed her alarm that Jessica intended to base a novel on the Bernardo family. It seemed
so unpromising a theme that he welcomed it. His impulse was to encourage Jessica rather than dissuade her.
“I talked to the pastor of St. Hilary's about it, begging him to intervene. Father Dowling.”
“Are you serious?”
“Andrew, she must not write that novel.”
“She's already written her growing up novel.”
“But this will be about your parents. And your uncles.”
“And aunts?”
Was Eleanor worried that some indiscretion of her own might come to light? Andrew smiled. Widowhood had turned Eleanor into a maiden aunt. She remembered everyone's birthday, sending a sentimental card. She was an obligatory guest for Thanksgiving dinner. She was dismayed that none of the Bernardos had married.
“Raymond's married.”
“Andrew!”
Was that it? Did she fear Jessica would write of her brother the runaway priest? He was feeling better all the time. What a dead end Jessica was headed for. He agreed to talk to her.
“How is your father?”
“All right.”
“All right! He has cancer.”
“Prostate cancer. All men his age have prostate cancer. They usually die of something else.”
“I wish he would go to Mayo.”
“He prefers Miracle Whip.”
“I don't understand you.” Stupidly he tried to explain the bad joke. She made moist disapproving sounds into the phone. At that moment Gloria emerged from the bathroom on a cloud of steam and Andrew crossed his lips with his finger. No need to shock Aunt Eleanor.

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