Casual Choices

by Tom Corbett

  He lay in bed thinking about that. They must all stem from some primal source, the newer versions clearly shaped by his vocational pursuits. No matter the context, they all tapped a primordial terror shared by all. Josh started to ruminate. He had never consciously pursued a career in the academy. After getting settled in Toronto, he migrated to the university as soon as he could swing it to complete his undergraduate studies. His academic potential was recognized, and he found himself enrolled in a postgraduate program, mostly because it was the path of least resistance. It was not a deliberate choice, more like a default position. He never sat down and mapped out any kind of future. It was all casual, like waking one morning and deciding to go to the beach. He had to do something, and school was something socially approved and, to his mind, fun. When he would be asked about his future, he would shrug his shoulders. One thing led to another, and one day he found himself finishing up his doctorate.

  Now he was faced with an existential decision. He really should become an adult, get a job, embark on a career. How different were the students he mentored in recent years? They were more driven, vocationally directed, and concerned about debt and money. They would query him about the value of specific courses or various volunteer opportunities, not for the inherent value of such activities but for how they might look on a resume. Surely, the world had changed, become more precarious. But had the students changed as well? Fewer seemed as concerned about the big issues that had consumed him at a similar age. Was that true or was he painting the past with a favorable palette of colors more to his liking. He could not decide even though he was familiar with a few survey questions that documenting sweeping changes in student attitudes and ambitions over the decades.

  Back then, he had been working for a community development agency. The pay was low, but he liked the people and it felt right to him. True, he distinctly felt that he was not optimizing his talents, but this was important work, he argued to himself. After all, he didn’t need much money. One day, his university mentor mentioned an academic opening in Vancouver. You would like that place, his advisor argued, gorgeous area.

  These were halcyon days for newly minted members of the academy from a respected university, so there were choices. However, he had never been to Vancouver. For that reason alone, it quickly rose to the top of his very short list of employment possibilities. The prospect of an academic position near the ocean was particularly seductive. That was what he missed in Toronto, no ocean. Sure, they had this big lake but that was different. An ocean smelled different, felt different. The salt in the air added to the magic. Ever since running away from Boston, there had been a void in his life. He was not near the sea.

  He recalled his first visit to British Columbia for his recruitment interviews. He drove around the city aimlessly until he came upon the Blue Horizon Hotel. On a whim, he stopped. The price was rather steep for his budget and he wavered. But the clerk, sotto voce, mentioned a lower price and suggested he might be upgraded. It was the off season, better to fill the vacant rooms at a discount. They put him in a suite at the top. The room had floor-to-ceiling windows with a magnificent view of the harbor and mountains to the north. Initially, he could not look; his vertigo hit him with full force, and his legs became rubbery. Eventually, though, he peeked and then stared in wonder at the vista. That was the moment he decided. This would be his home. He would try like hell for this faculty position. Later, he wondered at how easily his commitment had been secured. Was he that aimless?

  It seemed ideal from the outside. Probably two classes most semesters, sometimes three, beautiful campus, time to explore great questions, enjoying the admiration of young coeds. Best of all, the next generation would listen to him. They had to; he would have control over their grades and futures. Wow, instant respect! He wondered what that might feel like.

  Of course, reality was different. Time evaporated under incessant deadlines. The pressure to publish was unrelenting, the competition in the academy at this level was harsh and extremely talented. Moreover, this teaching stuff was easier in his imagination, tougher in the doing. The damn students expected to be entertained as well as informed. And raising research money, what was with that? He would not be simply signing on to someone else’s grants. Rather, he would be expected to generate his own resources. That, too, was easier said than done. It was during those days that the nightmares started. He would spring awake at four or four thirty each morning, filled with a diffuse anxiety that he was behind. The competition was probably up already, working to stay ahead of him. He would lose the race.

  Of course, he didn’t; while the competition was fierce, most of his apocalyptic visions were overblown. He excelled as an academic and teacher. Once you realized that some students can never be reached, the classroom became easier. You find others hanging on to your wisdom, and for the right reasons. He became a gifted and popular shaper of young minds. Most of his peers communicated information while he tended to focus on ideas, principles, ways of looking at the world. Perhaps what set him apart was his relaxed style, sonorous voice, and facility for integrating diverse materials into compelling narratives. Stories, he felt strongly, stay with students, and facts and data are ephemeral and were easily accessible in any case, even more so as the world-wide-web emerged. It did not hurt that he had an easy and slightly lopsided smile that brought students in, particularly those of the female persuasion.

  His mind was such that he did not merely summarize the literature but distill extent thought through his own creative lens. What he shared had a value-added dimension to it. And best of all, he was funny. He would often start each semester by noting that it was fine to doze off in class; he was tempted to do the same thing himself. But he would ask them to stay upright in their seats since the sound of a body striking the floor tended to wake others who were napping in the vicinity. Some would be startled. Besides, there was always the risk of a cut head, excessive bleeding, and all the paperwork that would entail. He kept a sign on his office door with a chart depicting the effectiveness of various sleeping aids. Topping the list was “one of Connelly’s class lectures.”

  At the same time, he was not an easy touch. He taught a variety of public policy, government, and program evaluation courses. He was passionate about the issues, both theoretical and substantive. Caring for the public good was something he brought with him from childhood. He was convinced that some attributes are at least partially hardwired. These were not specific beliefs and normative positions but basic dispositions—like acceptance of change, the ability to engage in nuanced thinking and basic compassion. In the classroom, he was scrupulously fair and balanced. He presented all sides of an issue, often had the most liberal students argue conservative positions and vice versa.

  What he wanted more than anything else was to create independent and original thinkers. Of course, he knew that was not possible in every case, not even in most cases, but he recalled his own development. Early on, he was pretty much a typical jock with above-average grades. His later high school experience and early college years were an epiphany, a series of epiphanies. He would spend hours dialoguing with a set of peers on the big issues of the day. It would prove to be a fortuitous and irreplaceable training ground. He desperately hoped to replicate his experiences in the lives of these students before him. At some level, he knew that to be impossible, but still. All this came about because he wanted a trip to Vancouver and then to be near an ocean again. Some way to embark on a new life trajectory.

  If anything set him apart from his contemporaries, it was his attraction to the real world. The academy is a self-contained environment where members of the choir preach to other members of the choir. Ideas, theories, hypotheses, and analysis are exchanged through journals that are read only, or at least mostly, by other members of the academy interested in your narrow area. That struck Josh as fine for many disciplines, but not his. He should be involved in the real world though not all his colleagues agreed. The culture of the academy was premised on
the notion that anything that distracted one from pure scholarship was peripheral and to be avoided at all costs. Expressing much concern with the real world suggested you were not a serious scholar.

  Josh, however, had taken a rather circuitous route through life. During his early days in Toronto, he needed a job. The network assisting American emigres at the time helped him find a low-level position in a human services agency. He did well, rising quickly even as he continued his studies. More to the point, he obtained a taste for policy and poverty issues. He got firsthand experience with families struggling to get by. Some were immigrants; others simply did not have the wherewithal to compete successfully. He thought he had seen desperation back in the Irish neighborhood of his youth, but he had seen nothing like this. It changed his life, gave him a kind of focus. Not since getting caught up in the civil rights and anti-war frenzy back in Boston had he felt so engaged. As he lay there wallowing in the blackness of night, he marveled at the randomness of life, how small events can eddy into a river rushing to the future. Yes, he thought, that was his life, a river that carried him along, never letting him see the destination.

  Rachel sprung awake. Disoriented, it took her moments to get her bearings. Oh yes, she was at her brother’s place—this was his retirement week. Why was she so anxious? Then it came back. She had been captured in a common dream, one that had haunted her for years. They were paging her. Code blue, code blue, will Dr. Connelly report to the operating room, will Dr. Connelly please report to the operating room immediately? The calls always became more urgent, insistent. She would move through very white corridors looking for the operating room. But each corridor looked the same, endless and indistinct and long. She would come to a corner and turn expectantly, only to find yet another endless corridor. And the calls continued, ever more strident. But it was no longer Dr. Connelly; the voice now was calling Rachel. It was a desperate utterance. Rachel, please hurry, please. The patient is dying.

  She now was running, but her legs felt as if they were mired in muck. She couldn’t get anywhere despite her rising panic and desperate efforts to keep moving. Then it hit her; she would not remember what to do once she got there. She had been a fraud, an impostor. She could not even recall going to medical school. She had been accepted, she intended to go, but had she? No matter how hard she tried, she could not remember being there, taking any courses. Why would they ever let this working-class girl operate on people? Who in the world was that irresponsible? Finally, she saw her goal, the operating room. Should she continue? Should she run away? Maybe she should roll into the fetal position on the floor. But her body would not obey her, and she continued on, running faster as the voice from the ceiling screamed her name ever louder. The name Rachel rang through the halls. Just as she was about to explode, she burst through the operating room door. But she was outside, in the cold night, far from the demands of her chosen profession. But the black she looked up into was the dark ceiling of her brother’s guest room. She put one hand on her breast, which was heaving and wet with perspiration.

  “Damn,” she said to no one. It was always the same. Why is it that we focus on our weaknesses, our fears, and not what we can do? Fortunately, in the light of day, she was confident in what she could do. Besides, she was damn sure she had been to medical school.

  She debated getting up but decided to lie there. She grabbed on to the first thoughts that wandered through her mind, anything to escape her hopeless dash through endless hospital corridors. Ora came back to her, young and beautiful, her slim fingers flying over the ivory of the upright piano in their living room. When she lost herself in music, her face lit up, her expression was effervescent. The eyes, Rachel recalled, the eyes would become even more translucent, even ethereal. At those moments, Rachel knew that her mother had another life. It was not in that apartment, not in this country, not with her family. It was a life that had been snatched away by fate or decisions made a long time ago. Rachel sensed compromise and loss, and it left her sad.

  Rachel would try to get her mother to open herself up. What was dad like when you met? What did you do together when you first courted? Why did you fall in love with him? What was your wedding like? But the responses inevitably were sparse and uninformative, if she got anything at all. These big questions would remain a mystery. That would remain the essence of her relationship with her mother—an enigmatic mystery tightly protected against revelation and exposure. They each would live in their own worlds.

  Rachel stared at the ceiling. Images danced in the darkness, but she settled on her childhood apartment above the bar her father owned. The furniture always struck her as from another era, perhaps borrowed from the set of a silent picture. The living room was dominated by the piano and adorned by pictures of a religious bent or painted scenes from the Emerald Isle. Several of the paintings seemed to capture the agony of the great famine of the mid-nineteenth century. In one that never left her, a desperate family begged for scraps on a country lane while a richly adorned carriage rushed by to a country manor that could be seen vaguely in the distance. Rachel would stare at the picture and focus on the family children, protected only by tattered rags, emaciated and on the cusp of death.

  Rachel was always taken by the pain evidenced in the desperate family. Hurt and desperation motivated her. She wanted to reach out and bind up the physical wounds imposed by neglect and exposure to the elements. Clearly, they had been thrown out of their cottage, ripped from their tiny plot of land. They soon would perish in the village lanes. There was no help. Her brother, she was sure, focused on the carriage and the cruel indifference emanating from its occupants. More than once he told her how thousands of ships left Irish harbors to sell produce abroad as the native Irish starved or were forced to emigrate. Josh spent more time in the bar where old injustices were shared as if they happened yesterday. He had heard time and again how British obsession with Adam Smith and laissez-faire economics had justified massive genocide on a brutal scale. It was simply God’s will. After all, they were merely impoverished papists, little more than barbarians, hardly worthy of a gentleman’s notice or concern.

  What touched Rachel in the middle of the night was how her relationship with Evan touched Ora’s sense of worth. Whenever her folks visited or met Evan’s family, Ora would be renewed. This was the world in which she thought she belonged, in which Rachel was sure she had conspired to join as a young girl or rejoin if the family had lost their elite position in society during the October Revolution. In her fantasies, Rachel saw Ora’s real family as descendants from Czarist royalty, distant relatives who escaped the bloody revolution by fleeing and remaking themselves. But in Ora’s heart was a desperate wish to make it back to her entitlement. Big Jim would never bring her there, but maybe she thought her children might. Josh held early promise but failed; he had fled. Now Rachel might succeed, not with her own success, but through marriage. While Ora preened around the Ballentine family, Jim would mechanically smile through gritted teeth. Evan’s family struck him as prime examples of the British autocracy that he so despised. Jim was gratified by his daughter’s apparent good coupling but retained his ingrained reservations. Jim would always be a salt-of-the-earth kind of guy, devoted to those who struggled through life. Those at the top of the heap would remain objects of scorn.

  At first, Rachel was happy to bring some glimmer of light into her mother’s life. The depression around Ora was seldom ever more than thinly veiled. But over time, Rachel realized that nothing she would do could salvage a life that had forfeited its hope and purpose. As Rachel sat listening to the silence in her brother’s home in Vancouver, she visited a long-held lesson of life. You cannot make another person happy. She had tried with Ora. She was the daughter, the one that everyone else said was the look-alike of her mother. That was her mission in life. This became a peculiarly passionate mission after Josh disappeared, when the house seemed lonelier and more desperate. But it was hopeless; some will insist on their own misery. You really cannot put in wh
at God has left out. In the end, we are responsible for our own happiness or hell.

  She had tried with Evan as well. At first, she balanced her own career to be available to his advancement. She prettied herself up for social events, smiled at people she thought dullards beyond all hope. She would make small talk with family members when she desperately wished to be back in her lab or on the ward. Not that her efforts did much good, Evan hardly noticed her efforts. He simply expected it from his wife. He not only possessed a trophy wife with looks, poise, and personality but also one that had achieved a position in life. That was a plus in his mind if it did not interfere with his agenda and purpose.

  It did not take long for Rachel to figure out what was going on. She was an appendage and not a very important one at that. But they were married long enough to have Cate, which, for a few months, seemed to make things better. Evan paid attention to the child and to Rachel. But that would not last; he became bored. He had made one mistake, however. Selecting a high achiever as a wife was a double-edged sword. What made her an especially attractive piece of eye candy, attractive and yet intelligent with professional credentials, also gave her a sense of independence. In the end, she did not need him. She had not even taken his name upon marriage, an outrageous act for the time and an unforgivable sin for the Ballentine clan. Still, it never occurred to Evan that he was the dispensable one. It was inconceivable to him that any woman could discard him like yesterday’s newspaper.