Straight Man

  “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.

  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 unch
anged. 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.

  CHAPTER

  22

  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.