Straight Man (32 page)

When the telephone rings early Monday morning, I decide to let Julie answer it. She’s been on the phone all weekend, so it’s probably for her. I’ve not wanted to listen in on her conversations, so I don’t really know who she’s been talking to or what she’s been saying. But I’m pretty sure she hasn’t made any of the phone calls she
should
make. She hasn’t called a realtor, for instance, to put their house on the market. And I don’t think she’s talked to Russell, though in fairness that may be because she doesn’t know where he is. What she seems to have done is talk
about
Russell, to everyone she knows. “It’s called a support system, Daddy,” she explained yesterday afternoon. “When bad things happen, it’s not smart to try to be the Lone Ranger.”

“Well, sure,” I concede. “A Tonto or two, but …”

But my daughter belongs to a talk show generation that seems to be losing the ability to discriminate between public and private woes. She sees no reason she shouldn’t tell her friends about her marriage, even encourage them to take sides, pass judgment. It’s not even the
knee-jerk confession mode that worries me most. It’s my daughter’s fear of silence and solitude that seems unnatural. If she weren’t talking to her friends, she might be listening to other voices in her own head, voices she might benefit from hearing out. Instead, she telephones. When she runs out of people to call, she opts for electronic company, the television in one room, the stereo in the next. She may even consider these part of her support group, for all I know.

I know without looking that the large suitcase she’s brought with her, which contains what she imagined she’d need to survive a weekend at her parents’ house, does not contain a single book. My daughter has never found a moment’s comfort in a book, and this provokes in me a complex reaction. She has done, without apparent thought or effort, what I myself once intended to do. The offspring of two bookish parents, I made up my mind as a boy that I would be as unlike them as I could. I was determined not, as an adult, to look up from a book with that confused, abstracted, disappointed expression that my parents shared when jolted out of book life into real life. I may even have thought that becoming a
writer
of books would be a kind of ironic revenge on people like my parents.
They’d
be taken in by my tale spinning, whereas I would not. I’d know how the dream was made, how the trick was done, and so it would have no power over me. The joke, of course, was on me. For three years during the writing of
Off the Road
I lived between worlds, not really in either, perhaps to the detriment of both. My father read the book in the hospital the night before he was to have a kidney stone surgically removed, and he confessed afterward that my novel had not distracted him as thoroughly as he might have wished. He kept noting how it was put together, he said. At the time I was wounded, although now, at nearly fifty, I realize how a stone can focus a man’s attention, how it may even diminish the power of literature.

This morning, like every morning for a week, I have awakened needing urgently to pee. There’s no use denying it. I have inherited from my father most of what I had hoped to avoid. When all is said and done, I’m an English professor, like my father. The most striking difference between him and me is that he’s been a successful one. Karen, our older daughter, is another apple that hasn’t fallen far from the tree of academic knowledge. She tried a few nonacademic things after college, but then
suddenly she decided to go back to graduate school, where she’s recently concluded both her dissertation, on Matthew Arnold, and an unwise affair with her dissertation director, though I learned of this only recently, the same way I learn so many things. From Lily. After the fact.

No, it’s Julie who’s the wonder. A child who’s made good on her childhood oath not to become a fool of books.
People
magazine perhaps, but not
Moby-Dick
. Her ambition I understand, but how has she been able to pull it off? Also, why isn’t she picking up the ringing phone?

I almost recognize the voice on the other end of the line when it asks for Dr. Devereaux. It’s thick and slow and dogged sounding, the voice of a man who thinks he knows something you don’t. It sounds a little like Lou Steinmetz, of campus security. Since I can’t imagine why Lou Steinmetz would be calling me at—I peer over at the alarm clock on the nightstand—six-thirty on a Monday morning, I try to think who else I know who sounds like Lou Steinmetz that might have a reason for calling me.

“This is Lou Steinmetz,” the voice says. “I was wondering if you’d be willing to come in to campus.”

Something about the way he says this makes it sound as if I’m being asked to surrender to the authorities. Like he wants to know whether I’m going to give myself up peacefully or whether he’s going to have to come get me. I can almost imagine him saying we can do this the easy way or the hard way, it’s all up to me. “Lou,” I say. “I come in every morning, just like you.” This is not precisely true, of course, but pretty close, since I took up the reins of abusive power in the English department.

“We’ve got ourselves a little campus incident is why,” Lou explains.

“An incident?”

“I’m not authorized to say more at this time.”

“I’ll be in.”

“When would that be?”

“I’m not authorized to say, but soon.”

The phone rings again before I’ve even had a chance to put my feet into my slippers. This time it’s Teddy. “I can’t believe it,” he says. “You really did it. I can’t believe it.”

“It’s six-thirty in the morning,” I remind him. “I haven’t even had my coffee. What have I done?”

“Are you saying it wasn’t you?”

I hang up on him and sit there on the edge of the bed trying to clear the NyQuil cobwebs. I’ve spent the entire weekend in bed, watching television and dozing and trying to draft on my laptop computer a short piece for the
Railton Mirror
about my father at Columbia, and discovering as I did so that a strict diet of broth, cold remedies, and nasal spray is not especially conducive to good prose. This morning, I don’t feel too bad, considering. If the phone would just stop ringing, I’d be fine.

“Don’t hang up,” Teddy pleads.

“Okay,” I agree easily. It’s a promise I won’t mind breaking if I need to.

“Somebody killed a goose and hung it from a tree branch on campus. Lou Steinmetz thinks it was you.”

“How would you know what Lou Steinmetz thinks? How can you be sure
that
he thinks?”

“You know Randy over in security? He was the one on the desk. He called Lou, and the first words out of Lou’s mouth were, ‘I bet it was that beatnik English professor.’ ”

“Beatnik?” I say, though I recognize Lou from his word choice.

“You want me to come over?” Teddy offers.

“Why?”

“We could drive in to campus together?”

“Why?”

Silence. No doubt he’s still miffed by my refusing to engage in his proposed council of war yesterday afternoon after I promised I would. “Okay. Just tell me. I won’t breathe a word. Even to June. Did you do it?”

I’m pretty tempted to tell him I did. I can tell how badly he wants to believe it. “I’m not saying another word until I speak to my lawyer.”

“This could be just the thing you need today,” Teddy says. I search for sarcasm in these words, but I don’t find any. “This could put everybody back on your side in the department meeting.”

“What department meeting?” I say, and hang up.

I put on coffee, then shave, shower, and get dressed. I pour myself a cup of coffee and am about to knock on the guest room door and tell Julie I have to go in to school when I hear a car drive up outside and see that it’s my daughter. She comes in carrying a cardboard box, which she sets down in the middle of the island.

“He’s been there,” she says, a variation on the more traditional ‘good morning.’ ”

She takes her sunglasses off, slings them onto the counter, and turns to face me. Her eye doesn’t look as bad today. The swelling has gone down, the purple and blue metamorphosed into less angry looking yellow-green. Julie herself, on the other hand, is no less angry. “He picked up some clothes and some of his other stuff. He showered, too.” This last seems to have particularly galled her.

“Did he use the toilet?”

She ignores this question and the man who spoke it. “Today the locks get changed.” Though her eye looks better, the tuck at the corner is heavy this morning, dragging the lid down.

“Julie—” I begin.

“And don’t try to talk me out of it.”

“Okay,” I say, taking my coffee cup over to the sink and rinsing it out.

“See?” she says when I turn around. “That’s a simple enough thing. I can never even get him to do that.”

I’m lost. “Do what?”

“Rinse out a damn coffee cup.”

Actually, the way she’s glaring at me suggests that she’d trade the two of us, husband and father, for a one-legged Puerto Rican maid.

At the foot of the hill I turn left instead of right and head out toward Allegheny Wells instead of Railton. I’m not anxious to get in to campus. If indeed a goose has been killed, there’s no telling what manner of shit awaits me. Admittedly, the idea of being interrogated by Lou Steinmetz is appealing. Under normal circumstances the William Henry Devereaux, Jr., who is accused of cleverness by his mother might enjoy twisting Lou Steinmetz into rhetorical knots, but today Lucky Hank’s heart is not in the enterprise. In fact, he’s reminded as he
drives along the two-lane blacktop of a famous experiment performed on children to gauge—what?—their ambition? self-confidence? self-esteem? In the test each child is given a beanbag and shown a circle, then invited to toss the beanbag into the circle from behind a line, something even the clumsiest child finds easy to do. Next the child is moved back to a second line, so that the toss to the circle is farther and more difficult. After each toss the child is moved back a few feet, so that each toss becomes more difficult, failure more probable. Finally the child is given the beanbag and told he can have one more toss, from anywhere he chooses. A few kids opt for the most difficult toss, sensing, without being able to articulate why, that glory is lurking somewhere along the back line. But far more kids go right back to the spot of the first toss, where success is assured. Doing battle with Lou Steinmetz, it occurs to me, is a little like tossing the beanbag from the front stripe. This morning, at least, I have little taste for it.

In the village of Allegheny Wells I head up the hill, and at Russell and Julie’s mailbox I pull into their drive. It’s occurred to me that maybe Russell is watching the house. If so he’s seen Julie leave and may himself have returned in the interim. There’s no sign of him or his car, however, just the sad, unfinished house that Julie, no matter how stubborn she wants to be, will have to sell now. She and Lily will decide all that. My job will be to keep my mouth shut until it’s a done deal. Then it will fall to me to figure out how best to sell an unfinished house. As is? Or do we—Lily and I—spend the money to finish it, then sell it, hoping to make the money back? I make a mental list of things that would be necessary. Shutters for the windows. At least minimal landscaping. Fill up the hole dug for the swimming pool and resod the lawn. And even then the house won’t be easy to sell. There are eight or ten houses for sale in our own development.

Our work—Lily’s and mine—is cut out for us, and not just this stuff with Julie and Russell. We have spoken over the weekend. Not for long, partly because I was hazy and stupid with NyQuil, and partly because Angelo—her father—is a subject I tread lightly around. But at least I’ve been given a vague outline of the events Lily did not want to share with me on Friday. The reason that Angelo was not home last week when I called, it turns out, is that he was in jail. Apparently he’s been there for over a week, either too stubborn or too embarrassed to
inform anyone of his whereabouts. He was arrested on several charges, ranging from public endangerment to discharging a weapon in the city. And despite Lily’s spending most of Friday trying to arrange for her father’s bail, he remained in the county lockup over the weekend.

According to Lily, who pieced the incident together from a police report and a neighbor’s account, a young black man made the mistake of going up onto Angelo’s porch, ringing the bell, and then refusing to go away when Angelo, who met him at the door with a pump-action shotgun, advised him to. Clearly, there’s more to the story than this, but I’ve been reluctant to press for the kind of detail that would make such a narrative spring to life. As I said, Lily and I agreed long ago never to allow each other’s fathers to become the cause of serious conflict between us. The necessity of this arrangement became clear to us when we realized that we were each fond of the other’s parent. Lily found William Henry Devereaux, Sr., charming (which he is), while I found Angelo hilarious (which I still maintain that he is, though I admit he has never threatened me with a loaded shotgun). My father’s charm and Angelo’s ability to keep me (however unintentionally) in stitches were, of course, beside the point of these men, or at least beside what we, their more vested offspring, considered to be the point. It’s possible to overlook character flaws of in-laws for the simple reason that you feel neither responsible for them nor genetically implicated.