Such Good People

by Martha Whitmore Hickman

  “Remember to tell me all about the prom,” she’d said, kissing him good-bye.

  “I will. And I hope things go well with your mother.”

  “Thanks.” She slid out of the car and, suitcase in hand, walked into the terminal. Watching her, he’d felt that familiar pang—she’s leaving—as though he was cast adrift without an anchor. He checked himself, thinking, just for a week, dummy.

  Ordinarily, he’d have gone right to the office, but he’d offered to drive Annie to school.

  He was back at the house by 7:30. No sound of Annie. He had breakfast and read the paper. At last, he heard the shower, the whine of the hair dryer. He looked at his watch: 8:10. Often she didn’t eat breakfast, but even so, it was getting late.

  He went to the bottom of the stairs. “Annie?”

  No answer. He read the classified ads. At 8:30 he again called, “Annie?” and started up the stairs, wondering whether something was wrong.

  She came charging down, looking ready for a movie audition—the white sweater, the coral skirt bouncing against her thighs.

  “Aren’t you afraid you’ll be late?”

  She stopped on the step. “You here? I thought you’d gone. You’re always gone by now.”

  “We agreed last night I’d drive you to school.”

  She seemed disconcerted, but only for a second. Then a look of dismissal. “Celia called me. She’s picking up two other kids. Then me. We have a field trip to the Bates Library. We’re meeting there at nine.”

  “The Bates Library is right next door to my building. I could easily take you.” Her expression hardened. Careful, he thought, and shifted to: “What’s going on at the library?”

  “Dad! Please, I’m in a hurry. It’s something about a new computer system for research. They want us to know how it works. You know, nerd city.”

  Yes, he knew “nerd city,” as she put it. He’d been on the committee to purchase that system for the college. It would facilitate all kinds of complex humanities research.

  “I could easily take you,” he repeated, and thought, You feel I don’t give you enough time? Here I am, offering. Instead, he said, “Isn’t it silly to have Celia make an extra trip?”

  “She doesn’t mind.” She brushed past him without a word of good-bye.

  He watched her go. He’d lost an hour of work for nothing, incurred his daughter’s impatience once more. He threw the rest of his coffee down the drain.

  It looked as though the rain would last a long time. In his office, he turned from the window, got some coffee from the outer office, said hi to Lutie Simpson, who was busy at her desk, came back and sat down, waiting for his spirits to heal. He took a deep breath, inhaling the smells of coffee, books, a certain mustiness from being in the basement, even the faint presence of pipe smoke that seeped in from Jim Bloskins’s office next door.

  This office was his domain, his haven. He could come in here and feel in a world apart—whichever world was engaging him—the Greeks, the German Romantics, the neolinguists, the rationalists. Philosophy was his garden of earthly delights—heavenly delights, too, or whatever larger frame of reference you envisioned when you got into metaphysics.

  He’d been content at Duke—teaching, research, enough publication to boost him to associate professor at thirty-five. He’d stayed another ten years. But when, a couple of years ago, Marsh had offered him this job—full professor, tenure, an office of his own (“Almost the biggest inducement,” he’d joked to Laura)—he’d been delighted to accept.

  He knew Laura had made his immersion in his work possible. It was she who’d borne most of the responsibility for the family. She’d assured him that was what she wanted. “I’ll get into other stuff when the children are older,” she’d said. Over the last few years, she’d berated herself for not doing more with her art. He’d tried to give her what support he could. He was confident she’d find her way.

  Sometimes he envied her the closeness she had with the children, as though they were a club unto themselves, and he an outsider. Jokes, glances they passed back and forth, allusions to experiences they’d shared, without him. A sense that, for them, he was somehow off code, missing the beat.

  Perhaps they were right. He wasn’t sure about his ability to relate to children—to girls, even less than to boys. His own passion as a child had been history. History and astronomy. On his first visit to a planetarium, he’d been so excited that it was a wonder he didn’t waft up through the dome. What was out there in that dazzling night? How to comprehend those distances, measured in light-years? With his allowance, he bought books, a small telescope, then a larger one. He spent hours poring over charts of the night sky.

  His brother was too young to share his enthusiasms. Six years apart, they lived in different worlds, and pretty much on their own—their father a busy doctor, their mother a teacher of piano. Every afternoon after school, sober-faced children, music cases in hand, filed in and out of his parents’ living room. They had more access to his mother than he did. He turned to his books.

  From time to time, a father himself, he made an effort to do something special with the boys—things fathers are supposed to do with their sons. He had been no athlete, and he was relieved when his sons showed no interest in Little League—all those hours of sitting on bleachers, cheering your children on, hoping they didn’t get hurt.

  He’d tried fishing. One morning when Bart was nine and Philip six, they’d gotten up at four, taken the fishing gear and a thermos of cocoa, and driven to the oxbow on the river, where they rented a rowboat from a wizened old man who appeared to be barely awake himself. They strapped themselves into orange safety vests and rowed out into the middle of the large pond, where they sat in the steaming fog, chilled to the bone, their fishing poles projecting from the boat like turret guns.

  Eventually, Bart caught a fish. He looked at it, flopping on the bottom of the boat. “Now what?” he said.

  “You have to take the hook out of its mouth.” He grasped the fish, which immediately slithered from his hand. The boys sat there, mouths open, as he struggled to recapture it, yank the hook out, put the fish in the pail. “There. When we’re done, we’ll clean the fish, take them home to Mother.”

  Then Phil caught two, and Bart another. He brought in one himself.

  The sun grew hot. “Are we done yet?” Philip asked. “I’m hungry.” They’d long ago finished the cocoa.

  “Me, too,” Bart said.

  Back on shore, he got out the knife the clerk at the sports store had recommended. He’d seen his grandfather clean fish, back at the Iowa lake where they’d vacationed decades ago.

  His first efforts ended with fragments of skin and entrails. Finally, they got the five fish cleaned.

  “Dad?” Philip said as they were approaching home.

  “Yes?”

  “I don’t want to eat those fishies.”

  “Me neither,” Bart said.

  They buried the fish in the garden.

  “How did it go?” Laura asked when they came in. Annie was with her in the kitchen. They were making cookies.

  “Well,” he began.

  Philip broke in. “Guess what, Mom?”

  “What?”

  “We buried the fish.”

  “That’s fine,” she said, as though not surprised a bit. “Here—a little solace.” She held out the plate of cookies, warm from the oven.

  That night after the children were in bed, she said to him, “Just the same, it was good of you to take the boys. I’m sure they’ll remember it.”

  Recalling the look of distaste on their faces, his own series of ughs and groans as the knife kept slipping, he said, “I’m sure they will.”

  Sometimes he told them stories. Ready for bed, they would plead with him, “Tell us a crazy story.” He would spin off fantasy tales of space travel, sudden drops through the center of the earth, adventures in which they had bizarre encounters with characters in books or remote historic figures. “And then Christopher
Columbus would swoop down to where they were hanging by their toes to the edge of the ring of Jupiter and he would give them all an earth-space ticket and they’d be home in no time, ready for bed.” The children would shriek with delight, jumping up and down on their beds. “More! More!”

  Laura would come to the door. “Trace, you’re overstimulating them. They’ll never go to sleep.”

  On summer vacations, when he was free from teaching responsibilities, they would go off on mountain-climbing trips, sometimes with Annie and Laura along. And once a year, when Annie and Laura would go to the church’s mother-daughter banquet, he and the boys would have their annual “boys’ night,” starting with the whole fat-laden works at McDonald’s, then a movie—the scarier the better. Sometimes they’d work in a round of miniature golf, get home tired, grubby, and happy.

  As a father to his sons, he felt he had been at least moderately successful. With Annie, he was less sure. Especially lately.

  She’d usually been there when he told his stories. Did she remember her laughter and delight? Did she remember the times he had carried her up the mountain, or stood at the side of the pool to catch her as, again and again, she jumped off into his arms? Or did her present mood have no room for anything but complaint and disappointment?

  As a little girl, she would show him her pretty dresses, her newest achievements, bring him her school papers and report cards. He had a great interest in family history, and it was she, more than the boys, who asked about the old photos in the crumbling leather photo album, the framed marriage certificate of his great-grandparents that hung on his wall.

  Then she grew up.

  He had never had a sister, never been close to the home life of adolescent girls. As, month by month, she changed from the slender stick of a girl with long brown braids to a beautiful young woman with breasts, hips, hair that curled and hung around her shoulders, he found himself confused, unsure how to respond to this new being in his house. Her voice took on new lilts. She had a gaggle of friends who would come by—boys and girls. She would introduce them to her parents. Once, he overheard one of her friends say, as he moved into the next room, “Your father is very handsome.” “Do you think so?” Annie had asked, but he could tell from the rise in her voice that she agreed, and was proud. He had smiled to himself, pleased, too, but aware of his graying hair, the slight paunch he had begun to acquire.

  At other times, it seemed she could hardly stand to have him around.

  And then, of course, there was Gordon—a nice-enough boy, but no match for Annie. Gordon’s chief interest was in cars, and a small combo he played with under the name of That’s No Momma. And yet this slight young man who was barely out of a retainer was the star around whom his daughter’s life seemed to revolve.

  When the rain stopped he wanted to take the station wagon in to get the tires rotated—get ready for the trip to Michigan. Maybe he could do it over lunch. After Michigan, they’d go on to Colorado—a special family binge to celebrate Bart’s graduation, before he settled down in earnest to look for a job. They’d do some mountain climbing, ride the high trails. He had a colleague out there he might try to see. A red light went on in his head. This is vacation, remember? You’ll get flack from the kids and Laura if you haul your work into it.

  He turned to his desk calendar, his appointments for the day.

  By arriving later than usual he’d missed the breakfast meeting on plans for a reception for the new faculty member—a specialist in Plato coming in from Tulane. He’d told Stoddard yesterday he might not be there—“Family responsibilities. Let me know if you want me to do anything.” Stoddard had given him an odd look, as though he might be doing something subversive. Trace didn’t explain.

  He looked at his watch: 9:30. He had his intro course at ten and his graduate seminar on Aristotle at two. Then a talk with Jim Bloskins about the course they’d be teaching jointly next semester. Maybe he’d pick Annie up after school.

  He gathered up his briefcase and a couple of extra books he was going to put on reserve, then headed off to his class. Contrary to some of his colleagues, he really liked his intro class—some of the students getting their first real taste of analytical thought, the available playgrounds of the mind.

  After the class, he drove down to the filling station and left the car. He got lunch at the diner, then picked up the car, getting back to the office in time to gather the stuff for his seminar.

  There was a note in his box, from Stoddard. “Call me over the lunch hour, Trace. It’s about the reception for David Ignatius. I’ll be gone all afternoon.”

  Lutie was at her desk. “When did he leave this?” he asked her. “Just after you left for your class.” She shrugged in sympathy.

  Trace winced. Stoddard didn’t like not having his messages answered promptly. It was too late now. He’d call him tomorrow.

  He was about to leave when there was a tap at the door. “Come in,” he called, without looking up.

  “Dr. Randall”—a young woman’s voice—“are you busy?”

  It was Kate Morton. The question usually irritated him. No, I’m sitting here twiddling my thumbs, hoping something will show up to fill this empty space in my life. But not this time. Kate was one of his best students—a fine mind, a pleasing manner.

  “Come in, Kate. Sit down. What’s on your mind?”

  She came in, blue eyes bright, dark hair held back with a purple scarf that matched the heavy sweater hanging over her jeans, sat down, and swung her book bag to the floor. “Well, you know I’ve been thinking about staying on after graduation and getting a master’s?”

  He shifted in his chair so he was fully facing her. “That’s certainly a commendable thought. I noticed your name on the department list of people who might want to do that. You’re a fine student. You know we’d be glad to have you.”

  A flush of pleasure rose on her face. “Thanks. I kind of thought that, but it’s nice to have somebody say so.”

  She seemed, momentarily, at a loss for words, and he said, “Have you considered a topic you’d like to pursue, or even what branch of philosophy?”

  She hesitated. “I don’t know whether it’s academically respectable—or obscure enough”—she looked up with a conspiratorial smile—“but I’d like to do something with Aristotle and academia.”

  “That seems a natural partnership,” he said. “What particular aspect of academia?”

  “Well,” she said, leaning forward, “ever since I heard of it in junior high school, I’ve been fascinated by the concept of the golden mean—of moderation—and now I’m interested in how that fits in with the way the academy conducts its life. I mean”—her voice took on an edge—“we talk about it as though it’s some holy precept, but we don’t carry it out at all in our work here. Moderation is a C plus. So, is there a way it’s germane to what we stand for or not?”

  He nodded. “Good question. It’s one choice. It’s not the choice most of us make—or perhaps should make.” He sat back in his chair and put the tips of his fingers together. “When we get to the Romantics, they’re more for all-out effort, outlandish aspirations—cathedrals soaring into the sky, and so on. And you’re certainly right that academics give lip service to the concept but they’re not too good at carrying it out. Though”—he smiled wryly—“if you’ll remember from freshman year, we do make our initial pitch about the well-rounded student, about academics not being everything.”

  She laughed. “Yes, and then you assign a hundred pages of reading a night and fifty-page term papers.”

  “I know. We’re victims of our enthusiasms. I’m as guilty as the next person.” He paused, the image of Annie’s face distorted in anger—“You don’t know me!”—almost obliterating the friendly, composed face of the young woman in front of him.

  She went on, unmindful of his inner digression. “But your enthusiasm is partly what makes the subject come alive. And if everyone practiced moderation in everything, we’d never have the inventions, or litera
ture, or the artistic things we have. People have to be almost driven to excess, sometimes, don’t they, to accomplish what they want to?”

  “I guess so, Kate. Even moderation has to be exercised in moderation. Marie Curie was hardly moderate in her search for radium. Or Crick and Watson, trying to find the DNA code.”

  She stopped and picked up her book bag. “Well, that’s the direction I’m thinking about—exploring that balance of zeal and dispassion. I didn’t mean to get carried away—no moderation there. What I came to ask you—if I decide to stay and do the master’s, would you be my adviser?”

  He was startled, and immensely gratified. For a moment, he didn’t speak.

  “If you have too many other students, it’s perfectly all right. But your lectures are so clear, and you really listen to the students.” She smiled ingenuously. “You’re my first choice,” she said.

  He felt his heart swell. “Thank you, Kate. I’d be delighted to be your adviser.”

  “Good.” She proffered her hand, and they exchanged a warm handshake and she left. For a moment, he stayed at his desk, basking in her approval, her trust.

  He got his coat and briefcase and started for the car. He still might reach school in time to pick up Annie. By the time he got there, though, the students appeared to have left. Maybe he and Annie could play Scrabble or something after dinner.

  A pile of mail was on the kitchen counter, along with a note in Annie’s handwriting. “Dad, I’m going to Celia’s for dinner. The casserole Mom fixed for us is in the fridge. Put it in the oven-45 minutes @ 350.”

  Oh, great, he thought, and headed out for Shoney’s.

  He was in the study, reading, when he heard Annie come in. It was nearly eleven. “Hi,” he called. She must not have heard him, because she went right up to her room and closed the door.

  “Ready?” Howard stood by the doorway in his gray slacks and sweater, his hand on the light switch, ready to darken the dining room for the arrival of the birthday cake.

  From the kitchen, Laura called, “Not yet.”