Straight Man (33 page)

Lily’s situation is far worse than my own. Her relationship with her father is complicated by the fact that she just can’t quit loving him, even though his rank bigotry both shames her and makes her crazy. But she cannot forget that after her mother’s death, which occurred when she was still a girl, Angelo’s devotion to “his little girl” was complete, and this devotion, more than anything else, got her through, finally, her mother’s loss. They were a team until she went away to the university, which changed their relationship overnight. In a matter of months she was no longer his little girl. Suddenly it was as if they spoke different languages. Every time she came home on vacation she’d learned more words that excluded him. Worse, she asked him not to use a lot of his favorite old ones in her presence. Where once father and daughter had been inseparable, they now found themselves strangers. Lily started dating the kinds of men Angelo had no use for and eventually married the worst of the lot. Me.

I sympathize. It’s the dilemma of the lower middle class when it sends its children off to be educated, often at great expense. Their naive hope (they don’t see it as unreasonable) is that the kids they send off will return more affluent but otherwise unchanged. Certainly not contemptuous. Angelo now regards his little girl’s chosen mate, listens to her learned speech, witnesses the way she’s raised her own kids, as well as her devotion to what he considers society’s dangerous youthful dregs, and cannot help but feel the complete repudiation of himself as a man and a father. Shortly before we were married, Angelo visited us at the dingy apartment where we were living and trying to save money. He took us out to dinner and encouraged me to tell him my plans. I don’t remember what I told him, but when I finished he turned to his daughter and said, “Where did I go wrong, little girl? Can you at least tell me that much, because I’d really like to know.”

Of course, Angelo is not the first parent ever to ask this question, it occurs to me as I sit in the rutted dirt driveway that leads to my own daughter’s house. Lily, who agrees with my mother that I am unprepared for my father’s return, considers my own relationship with William Henry Devereaux, Sr., unnatural, but I think our emotional distance is both sensible and admirable. Our disappointments in each other are deep and probably irrevocable. That we don’t give voice to them, that we don’t try to change each other or ask what the other cannot give, is both wise and prudent. Angelo could get away with asking his daughter where he went wrong because he knew she loved him far too much to answer. My father and I not only understand clearly where we’ve failed in each other’s estimation but also know that a full, detailed explanation awaits the one who is unwise enough to ask the wrong question.

I head to campus over the mountain so I can sneak in via the back gate. People may be waving signs with my picture on them at the front entrance.

I stop at the intersection across from The Circle Bar and Grill, and though I’m not hungry, it’s tempting to pull in and have breakfast in the company of men like Mr. Purty. That is, I’m tempted even before I see a pickup truck that looks like Mr. Purty’s towing a U-Haul trailer pull in, and a man who looks like Mr. Purty, dressed in jeans and cowboy boots and a western shirt, get out of the truck. I pull into the parking lot and I have to toot twice before he looks up, and until he recognizes the tooter, he looks like he’d like nothing better than to kick the tooter’s ass. The pointed toes on his cowboy boots appear particularly lethal, so I stay in my car and roll down the window. On second observation, Mr. Purty looks like a man who’s been stomped by a man wearing boots similar to his own.

“Henry,” he sighs.

“Hi, Mr. Purty,” I say. “What’ve you done with my mother?”

“She’s back at her place,” he shrugs. “Her and your dad. You know how much a hotel room costs in New York City?”

“Let me park, Mr. Purty,” I tell him. “I’ll buy breakfast.”

“Okay,” he says. “Beats me why people live in a place like that, what with the price of everything.”

I pull in next to his truck, which looks different, somehow. It’s still bright and shiny, but it seems altered in ways I don’t immediately identify.

“They done some job on it, didn’t they?” Mr. Purty says when I get out and he sees me inspecting it. “Took my hubcaps. Stereo. Speakers. Mirrors.”

I glance inside the cab, and sure enough, wires are dangling from the dash.

“They stole my tark, too,” he says, indicating the bare bed of the pickup. “Why would anybody want to live in a place like that? We wasn’t gone no more than twenty minutes.”

“You insured, Mr. Purty?”

“Yeah, it ain’t that,” he sighs meaningfully. “We made it back in one piece, anyhow. That trailer’s full of your dad’s books. They put the furniture in storage. Couple nice pieces, too. Worth more than all these books. Not that anybody wanted my opinion.”

We contemplate the U-Haul.

“They’re two peas in a pop, them two,” he remarks.

Over more scrapple and eggs I get the story. More than anything it’s a tale of Mr. Purty’s finally understanding the true folly of his long courtship of my mother, something he has suspected for a long time, though even when my mother announced my father’s return, he apparently still held out some kind of hope. Only when he saw the two of them together—realized they were two peas in a pop—did he finally grasp who this woman was. It must have been a long weekend.

My father, according to Mr. Purty, was exactly no help, which I could have told him in advance. The only real work I ever saw William Henry Devereaux, Sr., do when I was growing up was dig the grave for Red, and he complained of blisters on his palms for a week afterward.

“He don’t look too good,” Mr. Purty admits, “so I didn’t want to ask him to help out. How comes he cries like that?”

Cry? William Henry Devereaux, Sr.? It’s hard to imagine this. Crying is not an ironic stance. “What are you talking about?” I ask, a little sharply perhaps.

“He cries all the while,” Mr. Purty explains, minimally.

“He cries?”

“Damnedest thing you ever saw. One minute he’s sitting there smiling, then all of sudden he’s bawling like a little kid. Then, bam! he stops again. Grins at you again like he don’t remember he’s just been blubbering.”

“You witnessed this yourself?”

“I guess you ain’t seen him in a while.”

In the literal sense it hasn’t been so long. A couple of months or thereabouts. My mother and I went to New York when we heard about his collapse, but he was in the hospital then and pretty heavily sedated, so in the truest sense Mr. Purty is right. It’s been a long time, probably five years, since I’ve seen my father, a fact that doesn’t seem so strange to me until I think about how I might explain it to a man like Mr. Purty, who may have concluded from talking to my mother that my father and I are on the outs.

“Your ma said just ignore him,” Mr. Purty’s explaining. “Just let him cry. He’ll quit it eventually. She was right, I guess.” He shakes his head, remembering. “The way he cries you’d swear he meant to keep it up forever. Then he’ll just stop and grin at you. You’ll see,” he adds.

I try to imagine this, and, failing, I consider for the first time the possibility that my mother may be right, that I’m not prepared for my father’s return.

“
You
aren’t going to start blubbering, are you?” Mr. Purty asks. He’s staring at me suspiciously.

I assure him that I’m not.

He looks unconvinced but hopeful. “I was going to come by your place after breakfast,” he explains, wiping his eggy mouth with a napkin. “Your ma said to put everything in your garage for now.”

“She did?”

“Didn’t tell you, I guess.”

I can’t help it. Suddenly, I’m furious with her, and not over her presumption that Lily and I would be pleased to give over the better part of our garage to William Henry Devereaux, Sr.’s private library. “Did she even say thank you, Mr. Purty?”

He shrugs, pushes his plate away. “Not yet,” he admits. “Course the job ain’t done yet. She’s probably waiting, so she don’t have to say it twice. Aren’t you going to eat?”

It’s true. I’ve eaten only a couple forkfuls of eggs. My stomach is churning, and I’m not sure it’d be wise to fill my intestines with other intestines.

“That plate of eggs right there would cost you thirteen, fourteen dollars in New York City. Why would people live in a place like that?”

I slide my plate of eggs over to Mr. Purty. “Doesn’t it bother you when people take advantage of your good nature?” I ask him.

He shovels my bleeding eggs into his mouth and chews thoughtfully, as if paying such an exorbitant price for eggs has deepened his respect for them. “I’m glad if she’s happy, I guess. But this whole deal didn’t turn out the way I’d hoped, I gotta admit.”

“You think she’s happy?” I wonder, genuinely curious about Mr. Purty’s opinion on this subject.

He shrugs. “They talk just alike, the two of them.”

I consider this prescription for happiness.

“So do you,” he adds. I can tell it’s not his intention to hurt my feelings.

“I have to go pee, Mr. Purty,” I tell him.

“Go ahead,” he says.

“And then I have to go in to campus for a while.”

“Go ahead.”

“Just unhitch the U-Haul and leave it in the drive.”

“Your ma won’t like that.”

“So what? Just walk away from it, Mr. Purty. It’s not your problem.”

“She’ll have to pay a late fee if the trailer don’t come back today.”

“Let her.”

He considers this course of action. “Actually, I’m the one put down the deposit.”

“I’ll try to get back at noon,” I sigh. “Leave it till then, okay? You know where I live?”

He nods. “Your ma give me directions.”

I leave some money on the table for our breakfasts.

“Your pa says he read every one of them books out there,” Mr. Purty says, and he considers this for a moment. “But I don’t believe him.”

“How come, Mr. Purty?”

“Because it ain’t possible,” he says. “There’s too many of them.”

“You calling my father a liar, Mr. Purty?” I grin at him.

“I guess I am, Henry,” he admits, grinning back at me.

At the trough at the men’s room of The Circle Bar and Grill I try to imagine William Henry Devereaux, Sr.—a man whose greatest gift in life had always been his ability to see to his own needs—in the condition Mr. Purty just described. Having swilled larger than recommended dosages of NyQuil all weekend, I feel detached. My head cold symptoms have vanished, but so has my equilibrium. The graffiti on the men’s room wall swims before my eyes like my father’s lecture notes. I am dazed, unable to comprehend the simple messages that previous pilgrims to this spot have left for me on the wall. “Eat shit,” I am advised.

The William Henry Devereaux, Sr., of my adolescence would see nothing amusing in such witless vulgarity. Is that why these two words strike me, at this moment, as the funniest in the English language? And who knows? This new William Henry Devereaux, Sr., the one Mr. Purty has just described to me, might find them funny too. Maybe he’d laugh like a lunatic. Then again, it could be they’d strike him as infinitely sad, so damn sad the tears would streak his old, spotted, hollowed-out cheeks, making him unrecognizable to himself.

From the faculty parking lot I can see that the TV van is again parked in one of the VIP spaces close to the pond, and once again protesters have gathered. In fact, it looks like there are twice as many of them. Not nearly as many people as used to protest the Vietnam War, but then again these people are protesting
me
. They are protesting the demise of a single goose. Still, they are chanting loud enough that I can hear them in the car with the windows rolled up.

April, I remember from my own days as a sign carrier, is the best month for high moral dudgeon. Spring break is already over, so there’s no danger of having to interrupt the protest. The warming weather makes it seem right and natural to be outdoors. With finals a mere two weeks away, a good moral protest offers the requisite rationale for forsaking the dorm, the classroom, the library stacks. Lily and I courted through a series of protests—more worthy ones, I can’t help thinking—and I still remember the way my wife looked carrying a sign. Fierce. Beautiful. Strong. Good. I wonder if there’s some young woman like
her in this gaggle of protesters, disturbing the moral focus of some young Hal with a sign.

From where I sit in the faculty lot, I can see that in the distance several large steel girders have sprung from the ground over the weekend, the framework of Technical Careers. I’m reminded of my dream last week, the one of my suddenly Brobdingnagian house. That dream makes a different kind of sense to me this morning, my head still full of NyQuil cobwebs, a jailed Angelo, a weeping William Henry Devereaux, Sr., and a separated Julie and Russell. I guess I’ve been sitting there awhile when someone raps on my driver’s side door, causing me to jump about a foot. I see it’s Meg Quigley and that she’s mightily pleased to have caused me to jump. When I roll down my window, she says, “Are you going to sit there all morning?”

“You have a better plan?”

When she just grins at me, I roll up my window and get out, ashamed to have been caught in a reverie, something that seems to happen to me more and more. I check my watch, try to gauge how long I’ve been there, how much time has elapsed during this particular ellipsis. “You’re not afraid to be seen with me?” I say when she falls into step with me on the way to Modern Languages.

“I’m seen with dubious characters all the time,” she informs me. “They should all be so harmless.”

I’m not sure I like the idea of being thought harmless by a young woman as beautiful as Meg Quigley, but I let it go. “I hear you’re off to graduate school again next year.”

“That’s the plan,” she admits. “My father’s, not mine.”

“You could do worse,” I hear myself say, taking Billy’s part. Is this advice so wrong?

“I’m not sure I want a Ph.D.,” she says, more thoughtfully, less combatively, than I expect. “If you were to hand me one right now, I’m not sure I’d want it.”