“The Beast of Buchenwald. You’ve got your holocaust project and you never heard of her?”
“I know all about her. I just didn’t know her real name.”
“Most people don’t. Anyway, that’s how I get after Leslie when she becomes a pain.”
“She’s been nothing but a sweetheart to me.”
“And that’s fine. Just don’t cross her.”
“Really. She’s that bad.”
“She’s beautiful, and she knows it. She’s also smart and spoiled. That’s a bad combination.”
A burst of laughter came from inside the school. I waited for a bit then I said, “A lot of the girls want to adopt George now.”
Bible smiled. But I could see there was something else on his mind. His face wouldn’t capture the smile; his whole visage seemed to struggle against some interior strife. We stood there silently for a long time, listening to clatter begin to die down inside the building. Then I said, “Is there something you’re not telling me about Leslie?”
“Of course not.”
I let my cigarette drop to the ground and stepped on it. “Well we should be getting back in.”
“Young man,” he said. “Did you know this was my last year?”
“You’re quitting?”
“I’m retiring at the end of the year.”
“No, I didn’t know that.”
He looked at the ground, then shook his head. “I’m finished here.”
“Finished?”
“I’m going to try to make it through the year, but I may not.”
What he wasn’t saying caused something cold to leak into my heart. “What?” I said. “Tell me.”
“Don’t say anything about this, to anyone—especially not Doreen or Mrs. Creighton or any of the students.”
“I won’t. What’s happened?”
“I have an infection in my foot. I wouldn’t even have noticed it, but the whole nail turned black and it started to bleed in my sock. I was afraid it was melanoma.” I’m sure the shock on my face registered, but he almost smiled at me. Then he said, “It wasn’t. It wasn’t melanoma, but it was—well, I’m diabetic.”
“They have treatment for that,” I said. “You just …”
“I know. I’ve been on insulin since I was seven years old.”
“Oh.”
“They wanted to remove my big toe over the Thanksgiving break.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“I told them no. I’d have to be in the hospital for weeks. I can’t afford that.”
“I thought you just had to take the insulin, and …” I had not noticed him limping or favoring his foot in any way. Except for his emblazoned, almost crimson cheeks, he looked completely normal to me. “So what are you going to do? Just let it kill you?”
“Antibiotics might help, but with diabetes, you never know. So I just have to treat the infection the best I can. Keep taking my insulin, of course.”
“And what if that doesn’t work?”
“Well, that’s what I’m worried about. The doctor said I could get sepsis—blood poisoning, and that it would either cause me to lose my leg or even kill me.”
“Jesus Christ,” I said. “Let them have the toe.”
“I can’t.”
“Why?”
His eyes were unwavering and steady. “This will probably be my last year of teaching. I don’t want to ruin it with something like this. The doctor said it could take weeks.”
“But if the alternative is …” I didn’t say it.
“The doctor was willing to let me try this—he said it was a bit risky, but if I wanted to try it for a few weeks, I could have until after Christmas to think about it. As long as I keep soaking the toe in antiseptic wash and taking my meds.”
“Are you doing that?”
“Of course. He told me he’s already scheduled the surgery for the first week in January.”
“So he doesn’t think it will work.”
“A precaution,” he smiled ruefully.
Then we were both quiet. With no cigarette to puff on, and all the quiet of classes seated and waiting, it was kind of awkward standing out there in what was becoming a fairly damp and cold morning. Finally I said, “I’m sorry about this.”
“Well,” he said. “What can one do?” He seemed relieved to have told me, and now he smiled again and I could see it was a superb attempt to make light of his predicament.
“I’m really sorry,” I said.
“I got into this business—this profession—because it allowed me to talk about the most important things to young people, but you know, I can’t talk to them about this.”
“No, I guess not.”
“It’s—can you believe it? It’s embarrassing.”
I was so shocked and sad, I couldn’t think of anything to say. I wish I had told him that it shouldn’t be embarrassing. It hadn’t really sunk in yet that this man I believed would be the first real mentor in my life was about to leave it. I didn’t even get a full year with him. Those thoughts—all about me, I realize—didn’t come until later.
“Under my goddamned big toe.” He shook his head, and then tears came to his eyes. “I’m going to miss this place.”
“It will miss you,” I said.
“I hope and pray I can make it until graduation day.”
I thought of the next thing I said while I was saying it. “Why are you telling me all this?”
He shuffled a bit, started back toward the door.
“Professor?” I said.
“There isn’t anybody else,” he said. “Would you believe it? I don’t have anybody else I can tell.”
I realized then how alone he was, and I knew at the same time that I might have to be there for him and take care of him in ways for which I was not even remotely prepared. I liked him, and he seemed the wisest man on earth to me, but I barely knew him. He became important to me because of his age, the way he dressed, and the way he carried himself as if he was a sage. I have to admit, he got me with the chalk trick. I was his disciple when I saw that. But it wasn’t just that. He had just the right attitude where George was concerned, and he had rescued me from George’s father. He rescued me in a way that was not particularly heroic, but rather crafty and smart—he wasn’t Achilles, he was Odysseus. I believed he knew everything I wanted to know and more; that his mind would somehow connect in a very substantial way with mine and what I would learn would make me—well, there’s no other way to say this—like him. I didn’t want to end up like him, but I wanted to be like him. Does that make any sense at all?
He meandered on back toward the building and now I did notice a slight limp. At the door he turned back to me and said, “Remember. Don’t tell anybody.”
“I won’t. You have my word.”
“Especially don’t tell Doreen, or Mrs. Creighton.”
“I won’t tell anybody,” I said. “I promise.”
He nodded, gave me another weak smile. “Yes,” he whispered. “You’re a good man.”
“If there’s anything I can do,” I said, feeling kind of bleak and soulless. Suddenly the air felt like ice and smelled of dead tree bark. The breezes kicked up and started bullying the leaves and small branches. Professor Bible went in and let the door close, and I stood there, wondering what the hell was so good about the world.
16
Credence
Now I carried a secret around with me that gnawed its way toward the surface of my brain and tongue like a dark, flesh-eating worm. How could I keep from telling Annie, at least? Christmas break was going to be excruciating. The thing was she always knew when I was bothered by something. I’m not very good at dissembling, or pretending everything is the berries, when I’m worried. I couldn’t get the idea out of my mind. (I checked all of my toes every time I took off my socks.) I was also worried about Professor Bible, and what it would be like watching him march toward what could be the end of the world.
I have always been absolutely frightened at the
idea of leaving this earth—but especially of having one of those diseases where I can live on for a while, watching my own decline, not able to do a thing about it. Talk about fear cramping your heart—there aren’t enough drugs in the world to numb me enough so that I wouldn’t be a study in terror. Annie would have to take me around in a pillowcase.
Doesn’t it bother everyone? Doesn’t it bother you?
And every time I start thinking about that—every time I find myself worried that I’ll get one of those diseases and I’ll have days and days to think about my own end, it hits me that I’m living that way now. All of us are.
Sometimes I see all of life as a kind of ongoing, chattering, trinket-ridden, stupid process: lives going on all over the surface of the earth, driven by a small twisted double helix, or some kind of curling mitochondria, always changing, always losing ground against the dark, always casting out toward a pinched and deadly future; every blasted one of us collecting things—memories, photographs, movies, books, tapes and televisions, houses, hotels, cars and laws—and as we pass beyond all of it into oblivion, that is what we leave behind. Our legacy is mostly junk, pure and simple.
I made it through one day before I whispered Bible’s secret to Doreen. I couldn’t help it. She wheedled it out of me. She started by simply asking what Professor Bible and I had been talking about when we were having our cigarette the day before. “You guys were hatching something. What were you so serious about?”
I told her it was nothing.
“I saw him through the window. I thought he was going to start crying.”
“It’s nothing.”
“There’s something wrong. You haven’t said one thing since you got here.”
“I’m very busy.”
“What’s going on?”
I leaned back in my chair. I’d just picked up my gang and they were all outside smoking in the chilly, damp air. It was the last day before Christmas break, and I knew I would not be doing any work on this day. I was not at all busy and she could see I wasn’t.
“I won’t tell anyone,” she said.
“There’s nothing to tell.”
“Come on, Ben.” She sat down in the first student chair in front of my desk. “You don’t trust me.”
“No, I trust you.”
“Then tell me. I know something’s going on.”
I looked around, realized we were completely alone. I could tell her if I wanted. But I had promised Bible I wouldn’t tell anybody. “I’ve promised not to say.”
This only got her more interested. I could see, too, that she was hurt by it. She said she’d known Bible longer than I had, and he wouldn’t trust me with something and not her.
“Well, I’m sorry,” I said.
“He wouldn’t keep anything important from me.”
“Well, see? It’s not important.”
She didn’t start crying or anything, but her eyes glistened a bit and she started fidgeting with her hands, entwining her fingers and staring at them.
“Oh for Christ’s sake,” I said. So I told her. I couldn’t keep a thing like that bottled up anyway.
Right away she gave in to her tears.
“Don’t do that, now,” I said.
It took her awhile but she got control of herself. “He’s been such a good influence on me,” she said.
“Me too.”
“Like a father.”
I nodded, but I didn’t see him as a kind of father. He was better than that. He didn’t judge me unworthy, and snicker at me all the time. I loved my father, but sometimes he thought I was overeducated and lacked common sense.
“Are you crying because he’s retiring?” I asked. I handed her a tissue from a box on my desk. “He assumed I knew about it, so you must …”
“No, I didn’t know.”
“Aren’t you worried about the infection?”
“If he doesn’t get it treated, yes.” She frowned.
“You think he could die?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“How worried are you about the infection?”
“What’s the matter with you?”
“Nothing.”
She wiped her nose with the tissue.
“I just wanted to see if you were crying about his illness, or what?”
“Why?”
“I guess I was wondering how much I should be worried about it.”
“What do you mean?”
“If you’re really worried then maybe there’s something to worry about. But if you’re not, then …”
“Then you don’t worry?”
I didn’t answer her.
“You are really strange.” She sniffed. “Really, really strange.”
I didn’t know then, or now, what was so bloody strange. Maybe it’s not the same for you but I can remain pretty damned calm as long as everybody else does too. I frequently gauge how frightening a situation is by the looks on the faces of people. When I get scared on a plane, all I do is look around me. If everybody I see is completely calm and continues reading, or chatting, or staring blankly into space, I feel pretty safe. Don’t you?
17
Like Wildfire
On the first day of our Christmas break I told Annie. We had been having a conversation about assholes and stupid people. We’d just spent a lovely Saturday afternoon lying in bed, watching Jack Nicholson in Five Easy Pieces for the third time. After the movie, we decided to go for Chinese, and while we were eating our appetizers we heard one of the other patrons of the restaurant ask the Chinese waitress if she had a “main squeeze.”
The waitress said, “Pardon?” Her voice was lilting and soft and very polite.
“Your main squeeze,” the guy said, a little irritated to have to repeat himself.
“Men squiz?” the waitress said.
“Yeah.”
“I don’t know what is men squiz.”
“For Christ’s sake,” the man laughed. “Boy friend. Boy friend.”
“Oh no,” she said. “No boyfriend.”
“Would you like one?” the guy said, really loud. He thought he was so funny, he laughed way too long.
“What an asshole,” I said low, to Annie.
Annie said, “No, he’s just stupid.”
“I think he’s an asshole.”
She sipped her tea and said nothing.
“I wonder,” I said, “If there are more assholes or stupid people in the world.”
“What’s the difference?”
“Everybody can be an asshole once in a while, right?”
“Sure.”
“And everybody can occasionally find themselves doing a stupid thing.”
Annie nodded.
“So, the chances of running into either an asshole or a stupid person at least once or twice a day are greatly increased by that fact.”
She said nothing.
“Some people are born stupid, though. You have to become an asshole.”
Again, she only looked at me, a slight smirk on her face.
“Doesn’t that bother you?”
“Of course not.”
“But think of it. You can’t ever get away from either one.”
“I guess not.”
“Given a choice, which kind would you rather run into? A stupid person or an asshole.”
She frowned impatiently. “What’s the difference?”
I thought about it a minute. Then I said, “Remember that scene in the restaurant in Five Easy Pieces when Nicholson angrily clears everything off the table with one sweep of his arm? Well, he’s being an asshole in that scene. And the waitress is a stupid person, right?”
“I guess.”
“So …”
“Why isn’t the waitress an asshole?”
“No, she’s just stupidly following the rules in that restaurant. Some asshole may have written the rules, but she’s just following them.”
“I see.”
“She’s just being stupid. And he’s an asshole because he
throws that little temper tantrum and makes a mess in the restaurant.”
“Okay.” She smiled, which encouraged me. I always loved to make Annie smile, and I could see she was agreeing with me.
“Well,” I said. “Which would you rather run into? An asshole or a stupid person?”
“A stupid person.”
This surprised me. “Really.”
“Yes.” She picked up a spring roll and took a small bite out of it.
“But in that scene, Jack Nicholson is the one everybody identifies with. He’s the one everybody laughs at.”
“So?”
“I don’t get it.”
“You asked which I’d rather run into, not who I liked or didn’t like.”
“You liked the Jack Nicholson character?”
“Yes. I wouldn’t want to be around him though.”
“Why not?”
“Because there were three other people at that table and they had to put up with his tantrum, that’s why.”
I didn’t know how to respond to that. She was right, of course. Annie always had the most capable understanding; she always seemed to know what was right, where the balance was. I should have listened to her more often.
Anyway, she told me she didn’t think I was either stupid or an asshole. Then she told me I had done a fine thing by having that party for George. I started wondering what she would say about Bible’s problem.
She finished her spring roll and picked up another one. The waitress brought our dishes, and a large bowl of rice. I ordered another beer. We ate for a while, then Annie said, “What’s the matter?”
“Nothing.”
“You got quiet all of a sudden.”
“I’m eating.” I’d been thinking about diabetes and infections, and the end of life. I’m not very talkative in those circumstances.
“Did I hurt your feelings somehow?” Annie wanted to know.
“No, of course not.”
“Is there something you’re not telling me?”
“Well,” I said. I knew she would eventually get it out of me, and I didn’t want to take up the whole dinner with the struggle not to say what I knew I’d say before it was over, so I told her about Professor Bible.
She didn’t think I should worry about it. “Didn’t he say he was working with a doctor?”
In the Fall They Come Back Page 13
