This particular lecture had been due some weeks earlier but when the students arrived on the originally scheduled day they had found a note attached to the lecture theatre door informing them that the class was cancelled because Professor Zignelik was unavailable for what the note described as ‘personal reasons’. While it would have been harsh to have characterised his cancellation of that lecture back then as self-indulgent, harsh and unfair to Adam as only he was to himself, he now regretted not having given it because he was currently in a far worse state and he couldn’t cancel it twice. He wasn’t sure he was going to be able to make it through the lecture. Recently he’d been speculating that perhaps it was a bit late in their studies to be telling college history students what history was. But then the department liked the course being taught and it was popular with students, the latter possibly influencing the former. Anyway, if historians could argue over the definition of history, there was no shame in discussing it with students. Adam used to enjoy teaching it too, used to find it exciting.
But today the excitement would come only from seeing whether he could get through the lecture. Would he be able to make sense until the last student had left the room? There were always one or two who stayed back. Would he lose his temper and shout at the students if their ignorance mocked his choice of career, a career he had at times allowed himself to see as a vocation? Would he chastise them without humour or good grace because their silence in response to his questions, their failure to play their part in today’s employment of the Socratic method, a method Adam seldom resorted to, would definitively confirm to Adam, on the very day that he was most susceptible to counting any lack of response as confirmation, that he was wasting his life? Would he be able to keep standing the whole time? Would he make it through the lecture without crying? This could be an exciting lecture after all.
‘Is any of this true?’ Adam repeated as though his students’ silence might have been explained by the failure of each of them to hear the question the first time. Adam waited again but not for long. He had to make it through the silence. But even then it was possible that his mind could wander from the words he was giving voice to and leave it free to be colonised by those thoughts he most feared that day and would most fear for so many of the coming days in the silences between his words when his mind was completely unprotected. Breathe in but not too sharply, he told himself. The silences would get him. It might have been a mistake to adopt the Socratic method that day. The plan had been to have the students’ contribution fill up the time so that even if he didn’t get through all the material meant for that day he would at least survive the lecture. Surely he could count on these students to try to impress each other, flirt with each other, joust with each other armed with statements dressed up as questions, jargon from one or other discipline dressed up as knowledge, and vague political attitudes dressed up as considered positions within established schools of thought?
‘I’m so pleased none of you tried to answer that question.’ The class laughed. Adam breathed again. ‘Your silence is almost the perfect answer. Really! Almost. How could you make it better? How could you make it an even better answer?’
There was more silence. Come on, kids, Adam pleaded with them to himself. Where are your libidos? Where are your egos? Help me. I made you laugh.
‘Okay, I asked you if any of this is true. How can you know? How can you possibly know? I haven’t given you enough information even to ask better, more sensible, more meaningful questions. The better question is, “Having heard what I told you about the young man, is it likely to be true?” Let me suggest these categories: true, untrue, likely to be true, unlikely to be true, and, there isn’t enough known to answer likely or unlikely.’
*
Not far away, Diana, Adam’s girlfriend for the last eight years, had taken that day off and was at that time on her knees in their Morningside Heights apartment folding cardboard sides and sticking them together with duct tape to make the last of the boxes she would need to finish her packing. They had spent the weekend together assembling boxes and packing but you always need more. As the last minute approaches you always need more. On Saturday afternoon they had started making boxes listening to Jonathan Schwartz play songs from the Great American Songbook on WNYC. By the time he had closed the show with Nancy LaMott, the boxes had formed a wall.
Soon a man she had found on Craig’s List would come with a van and take Diana and all the boxes to an apartment in Hell’s Kitchen. A friend of Diana, an actress whom she’d met in college, lived in the oldest of the new apartment buildings that some ten years earlier had started shooting up out of the concrete like a phalanx of fortified fungi spawned by market speculation and watered by the rain coming in off the ocean. They now stretched from the makeshift Falun Gong camp opposite the Chinese Consulate on the Hudson all the way along 42nd Street to Times Square. The actress friend had been cast in a play in London and after that was scheduled to appear in a movie to be shot in Eastern Europe and Diana had the use of her friend’s apartment for six months. Beyond that she couldn’t imagine her life. But she had never imagined that this day would come and now here it was. She couldn’t cry. She wanted to cry but there wasn’t time. She still had to assemble what she thought would be the last box. Soon the man would arrive with the van. Why was this happening? she asked herself. It made no sense. It was so unnecessary. As the last minute approaches you find you always need more boxes. You always need more time.
*
‘Okay then,’ Adam continued to his students, ‘let me tell you a little more about the young man with the ailing father and the very young pregnant wife. The young man’s father’s condition was getting progressively worse and he was spending more and more time asleep. One evening the young man was massaging his father when an uncle came to the house and offered to take over from him for a while. The young man was glad to be relieved for the rest of the evening and his mind went straight to his young pregnant wife and where his mind went his body followed and he was soon with her in their bedroom. She was asleep but he woke her and only minutes after leaving his father’s bedside he was intimately joined with her.
‘What did she think? I won’t pretend to know that, but within five or six minutes the loyal servant knocked at the young couple’s bedroom door. He explained to the young man that his father was very ill. Of course, the young man realised from the fact that he was being interrupted at that time of night in the privacy of his bedroom by the servant only to be told that his father was “very ill”, that his father’s condition had become extremely grave. How did he know? Because everybody in the house had known for a very long time that his father was very ill. It wasn’t new information. It was a description chosen in the middle of the night in delicate circumstances by a loyal servant who was himself likely to have been affected emotionally by what was going on in the house, an expression chosen hastily with due deference and without any pretension to medical expertise, an expression chosen to impart an urgent request, “Get up. Your father’s illness has taken a turn for the worse”.
‘The young man sprang out of bed and ran to his father’s room. His father was dead. His uncle, the father’s brother, was with his father at the time of death. You know where the son was. You know what he was doing at the very moment his father was dying. Is this true, untrue, likely to be true, unlikely to be true or is there not enough known from what I’ve told you for you to say? Wait, don’t answer! There’s more. I’ll throw in a set of steak knives.’
The students laughed again. At least he had their attention. But then he’d have had that anyway if they’d realised they were watching the youngish professor with the slight Australian accent dying before their very eyes. Perhaps they’d seen him in the public television documentary talking about the legal battles of the civil rights movement. Maybe that’s why they’d enrolled in the course. It had been a few years earlier. He had been the one talking about his father.
*
There were a few pho
tographs of Adam Zignelik around the apartment Adam shared with Diana and she looked at them as she was packing the last of the boxes. She knew the photographs and the stories attached to them so well and wondered if she was looking at them for the last time. It was a terrible thought, one she’d never entertained before, to add to the barrage of terrible thoughts that kept assailing her. Adam had been such a part of her life for eight years that it was no more possible for her to imagine the next phase of her soon-to-be separate life than it was for her to imagine the soil hitting the wood at her own funeral.
In the days to come she would replay Adam’s ostensible reasons for ending the relationship and come to implicate his father in what she had described breathlessly and through tears as emotional vandalism. What couple did they know who loved each other more than they did? But she was in her mid-thirties and wanted children and Adam said he couldn’t in good conscience bring a child into the world. He felt he would soon be out of work. You don’t have a child on a whim the way you buy that jacket that you knew you really couldn’t afford. It looked great in the store. You wanted it. You took it home, tried it on but kept the receipt. You don’t have children by mistake, by accident, or even intentionally when a tide of uncertainty is welling up around you. Soon it will drown you. Adam felt that the biggest gift he could give Diana was a future, one with a child that she so badly wanted. But it was a future that wouldn’t contain him.
*
‘Okay,’ Adam Zignelik continued, ‘the very young man’s father had died and he, the dutiful son, had not been there with him in his last moments. The guilt was immediate and it was unbearable. Some time later but not all that much later, the very young man’s even younger wife gave birth to their first child. This newest, smallest member of the family fights to breathe but little more than three days after it was born it dies. The young man feels the child’s death is punishment for his having gratified a sexual urge when he should have been taking care of his ailing father. Furthermore, he is troubled that he had gone to his wife like that when she was pregnant. Is this true, untrue, likely to be true, unlikely to be true or is there not enough known for you to say?’
A student, a young man, raised his hand and answered at the same time, ‘It’s true.’
‘Why?’ Adam asked him.
‘Because you’re telling us the story.’ The other students laughed.
‘I’m pleased you’ve never known me to lie or to be wrong but I have to admit both have happened.’ The class laughed again. The student sought to explain his answer.
‘No, but you wouldn’t be telling us this story in class if it wasn’t true.’ The class laughed again.
*
‘This is insane,’ Diana had said many times since Adam had put to her that they separate. ‘People who love each other don’t split up.’
But as she looked, surrounded by all the boxes, at the photo of Jake Zignelik there was no one else in the room to argue on her behalf, on their behalf, no one else to put the case for them as a couple to Adam. Professionally, Adam described himself as a ‘dead man walking’. When the wheels of administration within the History Department turned far enough he would be crushed into insignificance and have no choice but to put his career into boxes not unlike those he was forcing Diana to put her life into that day. He could get another job, Diana insisted, but he said he couldn’t, not an academic job, not in New York, not in the city. He was convinced their relationship couldn’t survive him losing his job.
‘So you’re killing it now?’ Diana had asked incredulously. It made so little sense to her that it took her a long time to believe there wasn’t another woman. ‘What about an academic position outside New York?’ she’d asked him. But he said he couldn’t make her leave her parents, who were growing old in Westchester. And he didn’t want to be the reason she left her job. She taught public school in New Jersey. He didn’t want to be the reason she left her friends in the city. How could he, in good conscience, get her to uproot her life knowing he was about to slide downwards but not knowing where he would land?
‘Uproot my life! Are you kidding? You are my life! I would change jobs for you in a heart beat.’
‘What about your friends? What about leaving your parents?’
Her heart must have beaten more slowly because she paused at this. Leaving her parents was harder. She didn’t say no but it was definitely harder. They both saw her hesitate at this. He told her that he didn’t want to make her do it but he didn’t tell her how much the decision was killing him. It robbed him of sleep and led him to find himself tearful in the middle of the street hoping no one he knew would see him. He cried in the street, went into bars, drank and didn’t tell her any of it. If he had told her it would only have made things harder.
‘Maybe they won’t get rid of you?’
‘They will. They have to. I’ve left them with no choice.’
‘Can’t Charlie save you?’
‘Diana, there’s nothing he can do. I’m finished. I’ve really fucked up. I’m sorry. I’ve nothing to show them, the committee. There are people from all over the country, all over the world, who would kill for my position, kill for a shot at tenure in this department, in any department at Columbia. And I’ll tell you something, they’d deserve it more than I do. I’ve got absolutely nothing to show them and I don’t know how it happened. I’ve given Charlie nothing to fight for me with. Yes, he’s the chair of the department but I don’t expect him to go out on a limb for me in some futile gesture that smacks of something bordering on nepotism. I’ve got nothing to show him or the committee or … anyone, and he can’t save me.’
She would hug him whenever he’d say all this, which he would regularly in order to try to convince her they had to separate. Diana had raised the possibility of Adam writing history without an institutional attachment, without an academic position of any kind. There were examples of well-regarded historians who had done this with great success.
One of the historians much admired by Adam, the late Barbara Tuchman, had done this. Adam often cited Barbara Tuchman’s work to his students in his ‘What is History?’ class, not least for her easy yet erudite literary style. But her times and her circumstances had been very different from those Adam was facing. Barbara Tuchman’s first book came out more than fifty years before Diana needed to cite not Tuchman’s work but her life to Adam in an attempt to save their relationship. Tuchman had begun writing history for the educated public at a time when women weren’t expected to work outside the home and if they worked for paid income it was a bonus to the family’s resources. Adam, on the other hand, was expected by everybody to earn a salary that wouldkeep the nose of each member of a putative family permanently above the waves of economic vicissitude that were out there waiting to crash down on them. Perhaps Diana didn’t expect this now, not while her thoughts were focused on a child. But she could not be relied upon never to expect it. A child was a deal-breaker, the deal-breaker, and Adam would not let her take the child off the table. He knew that if she did she would regret it and resent him for it for the rest of her life.
Barbara Tuchman had been married to a prominent New York physician. Diana would have Adam married to a New Jersey public school teacher. Barbara Tuchman was descended from a family of diplomats and friends of presidents on one side, the Morgenthaus, and from investment bankers, the Wertheims, on the other. Adam Zignelik was descended from parents who had left him with meagre savings, a passion for social justice or at least guilt for not realising their passion for it, and a lot of fear, including the fear of bringing into the world a child who might know a sense of abandonment from which he, approaching forty, had suffered from almost as a birthright. How do you argue with this? Diana didn’t know and there was no one there to help her.
*
‘The gentleman in the front thinks I wouldn’t be telling you this story if it wasn’t true. Okay, don’t laugh; he might be on to something,’ Adam told his class. ‘He’s judging the veracity and the accuracy o
f the story on the basis of its source, on the basis of its origin. He’s using his powers of deduction, maybe even intuition, which I’ll come back to later. He’s got to start somewhere. Even if I’m only a secondary source for this story about the young man and his father, a secondary source can be your starting point. I’m a professor of history at Columbia University taking up my students’ limited time here with a tragic story.’
‘It’s likely to be true,’ another student announced with a vertically raised right arm.
‘Well, yes, but it could all be part of some ingenious pedagogic trick,’ Adam Zignelik answered.
‘Not enough is known,’ volunteered another student.
‘I’m telling you this story in a fair degree of detail. If I were making it up as I went along I’d probably stumble more or I’d gloss over the details. Remember the details. Five or six minutes after the young man and his even younger pregnant wife started having sex the loyal servant interrupted them with a knock at the door and a euphemism, “Father is very ill”. The child born later lived less than four days. Remember the details. Of course, I could have made the story up for some ill-conceived educational purpose and just have told it many times before.’
‘It’s likely to be true,’ a young woman answered.