Straight Man

  “That was my original position, if you recall.”

  “Well then, you got your way, for once,” Jacob grins. “Which reminds me. Finny asked me for a ruling on procedure. He doesn’t want you to conduct the on-campus interviews. He says since you weren’t in favor of an outside search in the first place, you shouldn’t be in charge. Since there won’t be any on-campus interviews anyway, I’m going to rule in his favor. Let him feel good about something.”

  “I bet you can trace your lineage all the way back to Solomon.”

  “He’s also threatening litigation if you don’t stop harassing him about his degree from the Ventura Boulevard Burrito Palace and School for the Arts. According to university counsel, there isn’t much we can do. If Finny wants to embarrass himself by listing a degree from an unaccredited institution, it’s his business. We can’t humiliate him without embarrassing ourselves in the process. If he ever goes up for full professor, we can chop his biscuits, but until then …”

  “That’s fine,” I assure him. “I don’t want him fired. I’d just like to control the damage he does.”

  “That’s where we’re different,” Jacob says, his voice full of good-natured resignation, pushing his coffee cup toward the center of the table. “I’d like to fire the bastard. Anyway, I gotta go.”

  “Listen,” I say. “Before you do your vanishing act, tell me when I’m going to get my soft money.”

  He gives me a look that says I know better than to ask this. Which I do. “When I get mine.”

  “Not good enough,” I tell him.

  “I know. What can I say?”

  “Make me a promise. Let me make a few promises. The money always comes through. Why not give our adjunct faculty a little peace of mind? Call it an early Christmas present.”

  “You’re forgetting your audience.”

  “Okay, call it a Yom Kippur present.”

  “Call it Ramadan, for all I care. I can’t give you money I don’t have. If I promise and the appropriation doesn’t come through, who benefits? We go through this shit every year. The troops all know the drill.”

  “Knowing the drill doesn’t make it a good drill,” I point out uselessly. “You could make an issue of this if you were properly motivated. You could do the right thing for once, just for the hell of it.”

  Jacob now assumes the weary expression he dons when I’ve gone too far, traded on the fact that we were both once mortal, played ball together, were even denied tenure. “Don’t you ever get nosebleeds up there on the high moral ground?”

  I smile innocently. “This nose?”

  “Right. I lost my head.”

  “I’m serious about this, Jacob,” I tell him, and I’m surprised to discover that I am. When difficult things can’t get done, it’s too bad. When easy things can’t get done, and there’s no good reason, it’s more than too bad. It makes everything seem deep down mean and petty. “I’ve got department stationery, you know. And I’m pretty sure you’d be responsible for any promises I make. Piss me off and I’ll not only hire them, I’ll promise them raises.”

  “That would be your last official act though.”

  “No threats please,” I say. “There can’t be more than two or three people in the whole university who would take a Jacob Rose threat seriously, and I’m not one of them.”

  As soon as I say this, I’m sorry, because of course it’s cruel, and its cruelty resides in its truth. Jacob is neither respected nor heeded in the university’s upper echelons. This is partly because the liberal arts are not themselves respected, partly because, for all his tough talk, Jacob has never been very good in the clinches, where most of the interesting administrative blows are struck. He’s known to be a nice, decent guy, the result of which is that he’s frequently told to bend over, assume the position. To let me know I’ve hurt his feelings, he drops his hail-fellow mask and says, “I’ll do what I can.”

  Having already used this line twice today, I’m not all that thrilled to hear it coming back at me. I don’t doubt Jacob’s good intentions, now that I’ve stung them into declarative life, but there’s the question of his follow-through, his priorities, which will realign themselves once the sting has worn off. I know this danger firsthand, having witnessed my own intentions soften, my own priorities reconfigure without much conscious aid from William Henry Devereaux, Jr.

  The dean pushes back his chair and stands. Our waitress reappears with the check. “I’ll get this,” Jacob grins.

  “It seems only fair,” I point out.

  “Oops,” the waitress says, startled by the unexpected sound of my voice. “I forgot to turn your ticket in to the kitchen.”

  I tell her to never mind.

  “Get the tip, will you?” Jacob says, enjoying himself again.

  I leave a pretty generous tip, considering. What I’m after is irony.

  The girl smiles at me brightly. “You’ns hurry back,” she says. So much for irony.

  When we’re out in the parking lot, Jacob says, “How come where women are concerned, they either don’t notice you at all or they want to rip your nose off?”

  “Let’s do this again soon,” I tell him.

  “How’s Lily?”

  “Good,” I tell him, adding, “How’s Jane?” in reference to his wife of eighteen years, who gave him the boot a decade ago.

  “Screw you,” he says.

  I decide, what the hell, why not send up a trial balloon? “Interesting rumors making the rounds these days,” I say, watching for a reaction.

  There is none, and that itself is a reaction. “You gotta love academe,” Jacob says. “Rumors are the manna of our particular desert.”

  “Hypothetical question,” I venture further. “Suppose an academic dean—say, of liberal arts—actually knew something for once. Would he share what he knew with an old friend?”

  “Is this an old friend who insults the dean and questions his integrity? Who can be counted on to be a pain in the testicles?” Jacob continues, for clarification. “Probably the dean would, at the right time.”

  “Would the right time be soon?”

  “Soon? I suppose soon is a good word.”

  “It’s true, isn’t it,” I tell him. “The job makes the man.”

  “What’s this I hear about your old man moving to Railton?”

  This stops me cold. I haven’t told anyone but Lily. “Where did you hear that?”

  “Your mother. She was wondering about the possibility of an honorary chair on campus. For William Henry Devereaux, she said. At first I thought she meant you. Which was why I laughed. Then it occurred to me she was talking about your father.”

  I smile and nod to acknowledge the insult, but otherwise ignore it. “And you said?”

  “I told her she should approach the chancellor. She said she already had his number.”

  “She’s got just about everybody’s number, believe me. Even my father’s. Not that it ever did her any good. Tennis Saturday?” I suggest, shifting gears.

  “Can’t,” he says. “I’m going out of town. In the meantime, you’re in charge. Just don’t do anything.”

  “Let me know if you get the job,” I say.

  To judge from Jacob’s reaction, this is a shrewd guess. He puts his index finger to his lips. “If I do, I’ll take you with me.”

  “No thanks,” I say. “I’m having too much fun right here.”

  I follow him out of the parking lot, and we get to the tracks just as the red lights begin to blink and the guardrail descends. Jacob guns his Regal and swings under the first rail and around the second. The last thing I see before the freight train comes between us is the dean gleefully giving me the finger.

  CHAPTER

  8

  My mother’s flat is in a section of Railton that was, once upon a distant time, monied. In the heyday of the railroad there were large public gardens, and the neighborhoods surrounding these gardens were full of stately Victorian and Edwardian homes—mansions, some of them—of which
only a few remain, most of those in disrepair, on the street where my mother lives. The public gardens themselves no longer exist, having been converted back in the thirties to an amusement park, which itself flourished and then died in the late sixties. All that remains of it now is a condemned, rickety Ferris wheel, a vacant shell of a building that once housed the carousel, and the huge open-air pavilion where summer dances and concerts were held overlooking what was once a manmade lake and is now a muddy declivity. Despite its decay, the former public gardens/amusement park remains the most valuable real estate in the city, though for several decades it has been mired in litigation, a battle of greedy but otherwise disinterested out-of-state heirs.

  The houses on my mother’s street have all been divided into large, high-ceilinged, drafty, impossible-to-heat rental flats, most of which are owned by the same man, my mother’s landlord, Charles Purty, who has purchased them one by one, at fire sale prices, over a period of thirty years. The only house on the street he doesn’t own is a decrepit old brownstone purchased by the diocese for an all but extinct order of nuns—the Sisters of the Divine Heart.

  When I pull up in front of my mother’s flat, I notice that Mr. Purty, who lives next door, is setting up his monthly yard sale, which always runs from late Thursday afternoon to midday Sunday. He’s got about a dozen large, folding metal tables, and his tilting porch is stacked with cardboard boxes full of the junk he will set out on them. Mr. Purty is a world-class scavenger, and since he retired a couple years ago from selling discount furniture and appliances, turning the business over to a son who no longer allows him to set foot in the store, he’s divided his time between scouting garage and estate sales in remote corners of central Pennsylvania and courting my mother, who, at seventy-three (several years Mr. Purty’s senior), must remind him of all these elegant, impractical old houses he’s purchased over the years. My mother is proving more difficult to acquire. She gives him the time of day only when she needs to go somewhere (she no longer drives) and I’m unavailable to take her. Then she graciously allows Mr. Purty to chauffeur her about in his full-size pickup truck, a vehicle she despises because it’s hard for a small, modest woman like my mother to climb up into and because the seat is always lumpy with junk Mr. Purty’s bought at yard sales. My mother, a woman who never looks before she sits, hates being goosed, even by inanimate objects.

  But Mr. Purty is a patient man, and even now, with my father’s return imminent, he’s apparently content to wait for my mother to become available. He figures he’ll outlast her stubborn reservations about him. He thinks of them as reservations. I doubt that Mr. Purty, whom my mother suspects of being illiterate, knows the word aversion, which more precisely describes my mother’s feelings for her landlord.

  “Henry,” Mr. Purty hollers over when I get out of the car and wave. Henry is what my mother calls me, so of course it’s how Mr. Purty refers to me as well, though I’ve encouraged him to call me Hank. “You look like you could use a pair of these,” he says when I’ve climbed his porch steps and we’ve shaken hands.

  He offers for my inspection a fake plastic nose, glasses, and a mustache. He’s right, too. I can imagine half a dozen uses. “How much do you want for them?” I ask.

  He waves off my offer of money. “Take ’em.”

  I put the nose and glasses in my pocket.

  “Aren’t you going to try them on?”

  I just grin at him.

  “I see your ma’s on the pop-ed page again,” Mr. Purty observes. He’s a man of few words, a startling percentage of them malapropisms. Lately, having amassed more money than he knows what to do with, he’s begun dabbling in stocks and mutual funds, a subject he imagines I, a professor, must know something about. He shares with me his misgivings about the market’s “fuctuations.” Mr. Purty wears a hearing aid, and the conclusion I’ve come to is that he’s been mishearing words and phrases all his life. My mother’s take is predictably less generous. She insists he’s never read a book in his life and therefore had no opportunity to compare the words he’s hearing with their representations on the printed page. She may be right. One thing is certain. Mr. Purty doesn’t understand that his verbal miscues are a serious matter to my mother, that she could never take seriously the affections of a verbally clumsy man. Even his awe of her own verbal dexterity she holds against him. For Mr. Purty, listening to my mother talk is not unlike watching a bear dance. It’s just the damndest thing. There’s nothing and no one my mother won’t pass judgment on, and this nonplusses Mr. Purty, who, if he has opinions, keeps them to himself. That my mother has so many and writes them down for publication in the newspaper strikes Mr. Purty as unaccountable behavior. If he were ever to have an opinion, the last thing he’d think to do with it is write it down.

  I myself have only one consistent reaction to my mother’s columns in the Railton Mirror and that is dread. A relatively small portion of that dread is occasioned by contemplating what she’ll say. No, it’s actually her byline that causes my heart to plummet. Mrs. William Henry Devereaux is the name she’s remained faithful to in the face of common sense all these years since being abandoned by William Henry Devereaux, Sr., my father. Her stated rationale is that she fears, given the remarkable independence and originality of her intellect, that she might be thought a feminist. But what this is really about is that she has always considered herself the wife of William Henry Devereaux, Sr., for worse, not for better, till death do them part, as agreed in public, never mind what the divorce papers say. As a result, there are God knows how many readers of the Railton Mirror who believe my mother to be my wife. Often I am called upon in social situations to defend her positions, which would be tedious enough even if I were able to ignore the Oedipal implications of being linked, journalistically, by marriage to my own mother. Lily, that other Mrs. William Henry Devereaux, is pressed even harder to defend opinions she has never voiced and does not share.

  “So, how’s business?” I ask. The table Mr. Purty just set out is crowded with an assortment of knickknacks, priced to sell. The most expensive item appears to be two dollars. Most are fifty cents. So, for mere pennies you can choose among fifty or so figurines, sacred and profane. Plastic Jesuses and plaster Marys mingle happily with grinning, big-bellied gargoyles. Most puzzling, since I have no reason to suspect that Mr. Purty is capable of an artistic design, much less a blasphemous one.

  “I put the good stuff out later in the weekend,” he explains. He showed me around his house once. That is, we weaved among the narrow pathways of stuff piled floor to ceiling in every room. “I always offer to give your ma a preview, maybe let her choose something. But she don’t seem too interested.”

  “She’s not sure you’re a gentleman, Mr. Purty,” I say. “She probably thinks you’ve got other reasons for luring her into your house.”

  “I do,” he admits. “But I’d be a gentleman with her. She’s a real aristocat, your ma.”

  I try not to smile, but I can’t help myself. I’d like to explain to Mr. Purty that my mother is not an “aristocat,” as he imagines. She’s simply imperious, an old scholar-teacher descended from intellectual nobility perhaps, but that’s about it.

  “You must be excited about your dad coming here to live,” he says.

  I decide on understatement. “It’ll be different having him around, all right.”

  “Your ma says he’s been pretty sick.”

  “He’s suffered a kind of breakdown, I guess,” I explain. “They say he’s improving.”

  “Your ma will make him better.”

  “You think so?”

  “Sure.”

  “Hold that thought, Mr. Purty. And thanks for the nose.”

  My mother meets me at the door to her downstairs flat, and we exchange pecks on the cheek. “Henry,” she says, looking me over briefly, registering my mutilated nostril the way you notice the passing of a bright city bus you’re not trying to catch. Both she and my father were the most detached of parents. When I was a child, they
would examine me from time to time, as if to make certain that I was still equipped with the standard factory equipment, after which they would return to whatever conversation they’d been engaged in. Neither could understand my attachment to sports, and both were impatient with athletic injuries, small or large, which they perceived as willful. My mother seemed to be of the opinion that serious sprains could be mended with a washcloth. Once I was scrubbed, she pronounced me good as new.

  Lately, every time I see my mother, she reminds me of Norma Desmond. It’s not physical, really. My mother is a slight woman, but in recent years, as her eyesight has begun to fail, her use of makeup has become less subtle, and the effect is more severe. Her eyebrows seem plucked into a permanent arch, emphasizing that severity. Her clothes are old and out of fashion, though expensive and obsessively cared for. She’s the only woman I know who routinely wears lots of jewelry. She applies lipstick before leaving the house, regardless of her destination, and again at the table after meals in public. I can never decide whether she looks as if she’s about to go somewhere or as if she’s expecting important company. Either way, she’s ready for her close-up. I’m no Cecil B. DeMille, but I can play that role. I tell my mother she looks wonderful.

  Which she ignores. “I see you were conversing with my ubiquitous landlord,” she remarks. “I’ve had to install new shades. The old ones kept inching up, and that man has more excuses for walking past my windows. He’s nosier than an old woman.”

  “He’s looking after you, Mom,” I suggest.

  “No, he’s looking at me. Keeping track of my comings and goings. He’s afraid I might be seeing someone.”

  “Well,” I concede. “That too.” My mother has lived here for four or five years now, since she retired from teaching, and Mr. Purty’s attentions have been a more or less constant complaint. A couple months after she moved in, she came home one afternoon and found him in the basement working on the relic of a furnace. When he left, she called a locksmith, and the next time Mr. Purty found it necessary to enter he discovered he was without a valid key to his own house. “What if I need to get in?” he asked, not unreasonably. “You can knock, like everyone else,” my mother informed him. “What if you ain’t here?” he wanted to know. “If I’m not here, you don’t need to get in,” he was informed.