Sophomores
Page 36
Oglesby turned from the typewriter. “Where is he going?”
“He has a new job in Miami. He’s flying there tonight.”
“So, how long—”
“I don’t know. I don’t know if he knows.” Dan hesitated to share more, like he was crossing some invisible line.
“Okay.” Oglesby nodded. He saw the line too. “So while I have you here, let’s talk about what’s next.”
Oglesby spooled a new page into his typewriter and, with the occasional glance at his bookshelves, strafed the keys. In under two minutes, he handed the following to Dan:
RATTUS N., MIDSUMMER CAXTONIAN CONSUMPTION:
Heart of Darkness
Frankenstein
A Clockwork Orange
Catch-22
Of Human Bondage
The Heart of the Matter
A Good Man Is Hard to Find
Invisible Man
I, Claudius
Breakfast of Champions
“And since you’re a hyperborean, Malone, let me add this last one.” Oglesby took the list back and wrote at the bottom in blue felt pen.
Yeats. (A poem a day.)
“Thank you, sir.”
“So this summer you’re going to read each of these books. And when you finish one . . . here, give me the list again.”
Dan handed it back, and Oglesby scribbled down a phone number.
“When you finish a book, call me. I’m around all summer. You call me and I’ll have you over for tea, or we’ll come meet here in my office, and we’ll discuss that book. Sound good?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What’s wrong, Malone?”
“Nothing, sir.”
Dan bit his lip, lowered his eyes, and pressed the fabric in the arm of his chair smooth. He wasn’t looking ahead to the summer like he should have. Sure, he would lifeguard and stare at Emma Wesselman lying out on the deck of Glen Cove Swim Club. In the evenings, his crew would cruise Forest Lane. But something felt off. Oglesby rolled forward in his office chair and tapped Dan’s knee with Keisaku.
“Listen to me, Malone. You’re going to be fine. Remember, you’re my Norwegian rat. Okay?”
“Okay.” Dan nodded and studied the list of books. I can do this. I want to do this.
“Now get out of here, my knight errant. Read away.”
“Thank you, sir.” Dan got up to go.
And Oglesby was about to turn when he leaned back in his office chair and called after his sophomore.
“And keep writing, Malone. Your journal is your life-force.”
Dan walked out of Oglesby’s office, where he found a half-lit Father Dallanach loitering in the hall, the layouts for The Roundup initialed and okayed. And with that, sophomore year was over for Daniel Malone.
* * *
They took the Zephyr to DFW. As the Malones pulled away from the house, Pat gave a parting glance to his Cougar, parked at the top of the driveway, the dark maw of its grille like the baleen of a beached whale. The evening breeze was scalding. Early June carried on the near-triple-digit heat wave of late May. They merged onto the LBJ and zipped out past the city limits, past the Trinity, out into the boundless airspace of the prairie. The Zephyr coughed cool air at their silence. Despite his new regimen of six cups of coffee and three ginger ales a day, Pat was managing calm. Anne was looking away out the passenger side. Pat took a hand off the wheel and touched his wife’s arm, trying to draw her in. She turned and gave an absent smile, and Pat could see it there in her eyes: all of her ceaseless ingrown worry. She was holding on, making a good show for Dan, but Pat knew how unhappy she was. This wasn’t a new start. This amounted to a trial separation. This was his exile.
Pat picked up the airport road and checked on Dan in the mirror. He was also staring out the side window, trying to escape this doleful car ride. He seemed strange to Pat, a difference he couldn’t quite square, but not the boy he knew. Pat’s comfort was that Dan was too wrapped up in his own summer plans—lifeguarding, driver’s ed—to really register his departure. But it bothered him that he didn’t recognize his own son, a young man halfway through high school, and it was then that Pat knew his anguish wasn’t that he was going, but that he had already missed so much.
They parked at the terminal and walked to the gate. Pat checked his bags, and Dan scanned the monitors for the flight. It was on time. Boarding began, and Pat kissed them both on their foreheads and then he hobbled slowly down the jetway. He turned back to wave but couldn’t find them. He didn’t think they had gone, but like the empty-hearted ancients descending into the underworld, he had disappeared from them. The jetway, which had baked on the tarmac all day, was broiling hot. He made his way onto the plane. Pat was seated in first class, where it took him less than a second to notice the booze cart. Pat opened the tiny nozzle for air above his seat. The Eastern flight attendant came by.
“Anything to drink?”
“Ginger ale, please.”
The plane pulled back and taxied. It rumbled onto the runway, the engines screamed, and the plane cleared the ground. As they leveled off, the evening sun burnished the wing and all of Dallas came into Pat’s view. He looked down at the tract housing, the glass and steel towers, the golden ribbons of highway, the whole city there below him, glittering like Cibola, which, as we have learned, was nowhere in particular.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you first and foremost to my wife, Susan, whose love saved me.
And thanks to my son, Dan, who will be a sophomore next year. Enjoy it, buddy. I’m very proud of you.
Thank you to everyone at Jesuit College Preparatory School of Dallas. It was a very good time and place—better than I could ever describe it.
Thank you to my high school crew who read this book and gave it their blessing, including Rick Dowlearn, Rob McGhee, Steve O’Donnell, and Will Kelly. (B.J.’s scene got cut, but I promise to make it up to him.) Friends like you make the world spin slow.
Thank you also to my high school teachers David Oglesby and Robert Donahue. It’s an honor, sirs.
Thank you to Jake Morrissey, Gerry Howard, Kyle Reeves, and Richard Abate for reading early versions of the book.
Thank you to David Black and Bob Dylan, who both talked me through it.
Special shout-outs to Richard Hauben and Chris Sturiano at Weill Cornell Midtown Center for Treatment and Research.
Sally Kim made this book possible. You are a beautiful person and a true friend. Thank you.
And Gabriella Mongelli, truly an editor’s editor. You are gifted—Norwegian rat status hereby granted. I am so grateful for you.
Many thanks to the Putnam team: Ivan Held, Ashley McClay, Alexis Welby, Brennin Cummings, Nishtha Patel, Ashley Hewlett, Ellie Schaffer, Erica Rose, Aja Pollock, and Erika Verbeck.
And thanks finally to my first teacher, my mother, Anne Desmond, who died under suspicious circumstances when her carriage plunged into the Liffey on the tenth of August in the year of Our Lord, 1919.
Just kidding, Mom—I love you.
Miss you, Dad.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sean Desmond is the publisher of Twelve, an imprint of Grand Central, and has been in the publishing world for more than twenty-five years. His first novel, Adam's Fall, was published in 2000 and was adapted into the film Abandon. Desmond lives in Brooklyn, New York.
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