Bodies and Souls

by Nancy Thayer

  When Reynolds turned six, and his mother realized that he had grown too mature for Little Golden Books and the picture books she bought for him, she took him one Saturday afternoon in the fall to the great public library. Reynolds would always remember that day as the happiest day of his life.

  Until then, the world had been divided for him into two categories: the Safe, which was man-made, familiar, limited, and comprehensible; and the Dangerous, which was natural, strange, and too huge to be understood or organized (because of this, the Dangerous was also often boring). Their own home represented the first, as did the little grocery store where his mother shopped, and the homes of friends and other human dwellings. Reynolds had been confronted with the Dangerous only twice before, once when his parents took him to the ocean, and once when they took him to the mountains. Those wild vistas shrank in his mind in comparison to what vaulted above him when he entered the library: a whole new category, the Amazing, this vast and beautiful space which had been shaped by human minds and hands. The ceiling rose open for floors above him, and he could see, behind iron balconies, rows of books with people moving quietly through those rows. The floor beneath his feet alternated as far as he could see in large black and white squares. Their pattern was broken by tall oak counters where people stood checking out or returning books. In one direction stood an enormous alcove with wooden boxes of drawers lined up and golden; Reynolds would soon learn that this was the card catalog. In another alcove rows of tables were occupied by people of all ages and sizes, bent over books. Everywhere he looked, he saw grown-ups walking slowly, reverently, speaking in whispers.

  His mother led him through the aisles, softly explaining the library to him, and as Reynolds saw row after row of books unfold before him, he was filled with utter joy. This was the most beautiful place in the world. This was what man was meant for. He understood in his own childish way that in this building man had come close to enclosing the infinite.

  Before he was ten, Reynolds was so addicted to the written word that words had more meaning to him than the objects or people they represented. Of course he excelled in school, except in recess and gym, but he was such a large boy that he could avoid being bullied. He was not the sort of child who wears glasses and blows up the basement doing scientific experiments—he did not want to do experiments, but only to read about them. The fact that all of human history, experience, actions, and emotions could be listed, explained, cataloged, organized, and analyzed satisfied him immensely.

  So it was that from his earliest childhood he developed a preference for life bound up in books to life as it was lived. He was tantalized by the idea of perfection, and irritated by real life, because it was so sloppy. Something, in real life, was always going wrong. He attempted a few personal relationships, but was always disappointed: people were so messy, so easily hurt. And life never did provide that tidy resolution that made the ending of even the wildest novel so gratifying. Reynolds isolated himself; he withdrew more and more each year into the world of the mind.

  As he grew older, he developed the intelligence and insight to realize just how narrow his life was. He did not become a friendly person, but his philosophy of life became friendly. He felt more charitable to people in general, and was able to remain that way by staying aloof from most people. This made it possible for him to believe in the perfectibility of man, and to believe that the people he lived among were valuable and good.

  While other men and women loved each other physically and emotionally, he loved the world and its inhabitants abstractly. He was pleased when he saw signs of heroism, kindness, or even intelligence in other people; he was depressed when he heard or read of people caught in demeaning acts. He disciplined himself, worked hard, and decided to devote himself to his fondest hope: the ultimate perfectibility of man. He became a professor; it was the only life he wanted to live, and he was very good at it.

  Now and then someone drunk or foolish would ask Reynolds whether or not he was ever lonely; his honest answer was always no. Over the years he learned to treat himself to all sorts of pleasures that more than made up for whatever he might have missed for lack of human interaction. He attended concerts, ballet, theater. He learned to cook with fastidious skill, and to know about wines. And finally he came to live his life in what was for him the almost perfect relationship with human beings: he taught at the private college in Londonton and became the dean of students there.

  This was, of necessity, disciplined and careful work, and Reynolds excelled at it. In fact he helped the students much more than any sentimental gusher would have; although the students from time to time thought him a cold fish, they were later to write him letters telling him that he was the man who had done the crucial and perfect thing in their lives.

  His college and his town became everything to him. He found here a source of solace and encouragement in the midst of an imperfect world.

  He liked the gatherings of man at formal ceremonies such as convocations, graduations, trustees’ dinners, baptisms, weddings. It was the shape that pleased him, the form. He liked to look out over a hall full of long, rectangular tables spread with white linen; the tables radiated out from the central dais with the regular pattern of chemicals in a trusted formula. He liked the elongated slender shapes of silverware framing the round plates in a design that was repeated routinely and symmetrically down the length of the tables. Man needed definition and order; it said something about the achievements of man. When the hall filled with men and women of all ages, sizes, shapes, and cultures, Reynolds could look out at them from his raised table with approval: those professors and administrators were for this limited time putting aside their petty grievances in order to sit together in harmony at an academic banquet. Rivals passed each other the salt; regional enemies discussed national politics; competitors bent their heads toward each other in order better to hear tales or jokes. All these contestants in the academic strife dropped their metaphorical swords for the space of one evening, and applauded, as one, the guest speaker. No matter that they would all go muttering out to their cars afterward, disgruntled with the speaker’s words or even more incensed at an adversary’s subtle insults. Still, for the period of three hours, two hundred men and women could be seated together in harmony, and that was an achievement not to be derided.

  Town meetings also filled Reynolds with pride, for although those people opposing tax cuts nearly always came to blows with those advocating tax cuts, still in this forum human beings could present differing views in a mature and dignified way. Reynolds attended town meetings partly because he cared about the community—and he was listened to because he always spoke so intelligently, with clarity and good intent. He also went partly to watch what he considered the evolution of sophisticated man in progress.

  For similar reasons he had attended church. The structure of the church service was even more appealing than the form of college dinners, for here the sensual appeasements of food and drink were not provided, and people had to sit together for almost two hours actually concentrating on words. It had given Reynolds great pleasure in all seasons to welcome members of his community into church, to escort them to their pews when he ushered, to look out over them when he served as lay reader, to stand with them as a member of their community when they rose to sing their hymns.

  He was something of a philosophical pack rat, he knew. He scurried from town hall to college assembly, sniffing out, trying to detect and collect signs for remaining optimistic about the future of his fellow man. He had relied on his town for inspiration.

  Sometimes he simply walked around the town, slowing his stride when he came near a home that enclosed what seemed to him a particularly admirable family. He liked looking at the windows of houses where the curtains hung in such a fashion that they seemed to him, as an outsider, to be framing a little diamond of bright, mysterious, inner life. He liked the design of Londonton; the way it was neatly bisected by Main Street, ornamented by the winding Blue River, divided into
explicit areas: college, residential, commercial. Reynolds approved of the way man had laid his shapes upon the land so that the town itself seemed to have sprung up from the ground as naturally as the trees.

  Sometimes during his walks, Reynolds would pause to chat with an acquaintance. He would lean up against the brick building which sheltered the dry-cleaning business that had once belonged to Wilbur Wilson. And he would reflect that the permanence of this brick building was satisfying; the gritty, wickerlike pattern of layered bricks had been there for decades and would endure for decades. It was a shame that an individual good man could not have the same powers of longevity.

  Reynolds admired Wilbur Wilson, for even though the older man was not educated, he had become wise, and it settled Reynolds’s soul to know that such a man existed. Sometimes in the past Reynolds had taken his raincoat or sportscoat into Wilson’s Cleaners, and had rested against the high counter while Wilbur leaned across from the other side; they would stand there for a long time, talking in a quiet, comfortable way, about local news and events. Reynolds would look down at their hands as they talked. His own were usually folded neatly, but Wilbur’s were always gently stroking and smoothing out the fabric of whatever item it was that had been placed on the counter for his care. Wilbur obviously respected substance; he treated all garments as if they had dignity, because he had his own dignity, and believed implicitly in the worth of the world and its materials. Reynolds’s hands were long, smooth, and fluent, and when he looked at his hands and then at Wilbur’s, he hoped that when his own hands had grown gnarled and wrinkled like Wilbur’s, his spirit would be as refined and smooth and fluent as Wilbur’s spirit. It was the flesh, the voices of people like Wilbur that helped Reynolds keep his intellectual faith in the perfectibility of man.

  But now Wilbur was not enough, and the superficial prettiness of the town did not suffice. It had been a difficult year for Reynolds, and he was growing old.

  In May of this year, a senior at the college who was the son of friends of Reynolds’s had been discovered cheating: he had plagiarized not one but several papers for various courses. Reynolds and the ethics committee had had no recourse but to expel the boy from college; he could not graduate. What a waste, what a shame that had been, for the boy was not stupid or even incorrigible, but merely lazy. The news of his misdeed had nearly destroyed his family, especially the mother, who had struggled so hard to impart the proper values to her son. All of graduation had been clouded for Reynolds by this one senseless episode.

  Then a disaster of greater dimension had unraveled around Reynolds’s life, and the worst of it was that he had not realized until the very last what was happening. He, who prided himself on his disconcernment, had been duped.

  Reynolds served on many of the college’s committees; the other professors trusted his judgment, and he found this responsibility satisfied his desire for human interaction. He had taught at the college for over twenty years, and was known for his charity and equity; people confided in him. At the beginning of the summer, he was visited in his office at the college by a tall, strikingly attractive young woman named Lana Maccoby. Lana was a junior professor in the English department; she had a Ph.D. and a wonderfully warm way about her. She hadn’t published much, but was working on a book of criticism of contemporary American women poets, and she was an excellent teacher. The students flocked to her courses. Reynolds was not in Lana’s department, so he had never had cause to spend much time with her, but he supposed he liked her as well as he liked any human being, and thought she liked him.

  When she entered his office on that muggy June morning, she was wearing jeans, rubber thongs, and a T-shirt with a picture of Miss Piggy on the front. She looked more like a student than a professor, and she was so pretty and pleasant to look at that it was a real shock when Reynolds realized that she had come to him for a serious reason.

  “I need your help, Reynolds,” she said. “I’ve just heard that the administration is going to make Sandra Tyroff chairman of the English department.”

  “Well,” Reynolds said, leaning back in his typing chair, “someone has to be chairman.” Only six weeks before, Maxwell Ellison, who had been chairman of the English department for years, had died of a heart attack. Reynolds was on the college committee on appointments and promotion; he was aware that a search committee had been formed to study possible candidates for the vacant chairmanship and to advise the president and Reynolds’s committee of their recommendations.

  “Yes, of course,” Lana said, “but it shouldn’t be Sandra Tyroff. You can’t imagine. No one likes her; everyone is horrified that she has been suggested as a possible candidate.”

  “Well, you know we need a woman in a chair at this college,” Reynolds said.

  “No one believes that more than I do, Reynolds, but Sandra Tyroff is the wrong woman. She is unimaginative, tyrannical, dictatorial, to the point of insanity. No one in the department can deal with her. Reynolds, it will be a disaster if she runs the department.”

  “Why?” Reynolds said. “Give me some definite examples.”

  For the next three hours, Lana Maccoby gave Reynolds definite examples. She also gave him a list of names of other members of the department who had asked her to represent them in discussing this situation with him. Obviously, because of the nature of the problem, it was necessary to keep their discontent secret, because the wrongs that Sandra Tyroff had committed were of the subtle sort that slid snakelike through the department, leaving distrust and injury, but no telltale sign. There was no one deed of misbehavior that could disqualify her for the job. But there were so many devious, petty, arrogant acts that after hearing about her, Reynolds thought Sandra Tyroff sounded like one of the nastiest people he’d ever heard of.

  Still, he could not judge her on the word of one person; he spent the next month phoning and visiting other professors in the English department. The evidence built fraction by fraction. Sandra Tyroff had snubbed this person, slighted that person, listened to another professor’s advice then done the opposite thing, taken credit for others’ actions, accused unfairly, refused to listen. Hour after hour Reynolds sat in the homes of the junior professors, listening as they or their spouses spoke of indignities and injustices done to them by Sandra Tyroff. Because it was summer, various members of the department were off at different times on vacation, so Reynolds could not deal officially with the problem until early in September when the new semester began. He then sent out a memo, calling together a special session of the search committee and the committee on appointments and promotion. He spent a great deal of time and care on his agenda, but because he had never had any dealings with Sandra Tyroff himself, he had to rely on the professors in the English department to put forth their own case. He sent memos to everyone he had spoken with over the summer.

  The meeting was held on a Thursday afternoon when the September sun was so warm and the day so clear that it mocked any kind of intellectual activity. How could all not be right with the world? But Reynolds worked himself up to a full stand of righteous indignation, and left the heat of the sun for the cool of the college building, because he meant to represent the people who had entrusted him with their fears and who relied on him to see justice done. He strode into the conflict, his shoulders stiff with rectitude.

  Seated around the oval table were Sandra Tyroff, the chairman of the search committee, and various members of the committee on appointments and promotions. Not one member of the English department was present.

  Reynolds sat down and looked at his watch. Too much was at stake for him to indulge in any comfortable small talk with anyone else in the room; that would mitigate the seriousness of this case. He looked at his watch again. After fifteen minutes, it became apparent that no members of the English department were going to arrive. Reynolds took his memo out of his briefcase and studied it: no, he had not printed the wrong date or time.

  “I’m sorry, gentlemen, Miss Tyroff,” he said at last. “It seems I’ve called y
ou together for a meeting that for some reason is not taking place. Let me only ask you—any one of you—to do me the favor of going to Ms. Maccoby’s room and asking her to come here. She was the one who began all this, and I’m amazed that she isn’t here now. Either everyone in the English department has been killed in a bizarre series of accidents, or I’ve been abandoned.”

  Because he was smiling, speaking lightly, the others were relieved; a professor from the Philosophy department went off and returned with Lana Maccoby. She greeted everyone with friendly smiles, sank into a chair, and looked at Reynolds.

  “Ms. Maccoby,” Reynolds said, “would you please tell the committee why you object to Sandra Tyroff being named chairman of the English department?”

  “Object? But I don’t object,” Lana said. She even looked surprised.

  Reynolds was speechless for only a moment. “You mean you did not come to my office earlier this summer to ask me to help you prevent Ms. Tyroff from gaining the chairmanship of the department?”

  “Whyever would I want to do a thing like that?” Lana asked.

  “You are denying that you came to me on June 7, at ten o’clock in the morning, and spent three hours describing to me the various reasons that Sandra Tyroff should not be made chairman of the English department?”

  Lana did not pause. “Of course I don’t deny that I visited you one day in June in your office, although I must admit I can’t pinpoint the time and date with the precision you’ve given it. But you must have completely misunderstood me. I didn’t mean for anything I said to be misinterpreted as a vote of no-confidence in Ms. Tyroff.”