Straight Man

by Richard Russo

  “If you’d married him like I told you to, you wouldn’t have him lurking around all the time,” I remind her. “You know how devoted he is. By now you’d have convinced him to take you to live in Europe.”

  “True,” my mother concedes. She’s very aware of the spell she’s cast on her landlord. “But then I’d be in Europe with Charles Purty. What if I met someone I liked there?”

  “Suit yourself, Mother.”

  “I will,” she assures me. “It’s lunchtime. Have you eaten? Would you like a sandwich?”

  This is not an easy decision. My stomach is indeed growling, having been teased into expectation by the dean’s corned beef. Still, I know what to expect from my mother. Always an austere woman, she’s become positively spartan in old age. I don’t know what kind of sandwich she has in mind, but I know it will be thin, elegant, mostly bread. On the other hand, this may be my last opportunity for any sort of lunch today. I tell her a sandwich sounds good.

  Actually, the worst of my mother’s austerity manifested itself after my father left her for the first of his graduate students. I suspect my mother saw in this new circumstance very few attractive choices. Apparently the most appealing was the opportunity for theater. Instead of beggaring my father in the divorce settlement like a sensible woman, she let him off the hook and began to live in what she referred to as the straitened circumstances of an abandoned woman. Her plan, I imagine, was to humiliate my father, which shows how little she understood him if she thought, even for an instant, that such a tactic was likely to succeed. If she wanted to pretend that the dissolution of their marriage had left her destitute, that was fine with him, provided he himself was not made destitute for real.

  The simple truth was this. They were both professors at a good midwestern university when my father left, and my mother was well respected and kept her position when my father and Trophy Wife Number One left for the East and life in the academic fast lane. She wasn’t then and hasn’t been since, so far as I know, strapped for money, though she chose to live far below her means in a shabby genteel university house while she continued to teach, and here in Charles Purty’s flat since she retired and moved to Railton.

  The sandwich my mother serves me is two slices of white bread into which she has massaged the thinnest possible layer of pimento cheese spread. “I do wish he’d get over his ridiculous crush,” she says, sitting down opposite me at the kitchen table. She’s made herself a sandwich identical to my own. “I mean, it’s absurd. What can he want from a seventy-three-year-old woman?”

  Despite this reasonable protest, there’s something about the way my mother registers it that suggests she doesn’t find it entirely absurd, as if she’s got a strong inkling what Mr. Purty has in mind and objects less to the principle of the thing than to the man in question. Perhaps she even wants me to weigh in on the matter, assure her I don’t think it’s ridiculous for Charles Purty to lust after a woman her age. But I know a son’s duties and I know this isn’t one of them. True, my mother is a remarkably well-preserved woman, who looks about Mr. Purty’s age, though he’s several years her junior. Still. I chew my bread and try to look thoughtful and abstractly sympathetic. My nostril begins to pulse with this complex effort.

  “He was impressed by your last column,” I say, to shift emphasis. A sound strategy. My mother is vain about her writing. Of my father’s numerous books of literary criticism, all of which created a stir, only one, his first, is now considered a classic. It’s my mother’s unwavering position that the reason for this is that the first was the only one she edited. It’s her opinion that by abandoning the true companion of his life (herself) for a series of academic bimbos, my father forsook his truest self. Whereas he used to be a powerful and original thinker, now he just jumps on bandwagons. My own take is that my father is simply a careerist, that this is what he would have been regardless.

  “It was one of my better efforts,” she admits. “I’m told the piece may be widely reprinted.” When I don’t immediately respond to this, she continues, “Speaking of journalistic efforts, may I suggest you avoid autobiography in the future?”

  This request is in reference to a recent column of mine, written shortly after I was informed that William Henry Devereaux, Sr., would be returning to the bosom of his family, an event that my mother told me to expect, any day, for nearly a year after he left us and that now, forty years later, has apparently earned her the right to say I told you so. In the essay I recounted the events leading up to the acquisition, naming, and burial of the Irish setter my father brought home when I was a boy.

  “Humor is a poor substitute for accuracy,” my mother reminds me. “And a poorer proxy for truth.”

  I’ve got a wad of pimento-flavored bread lodged in my throat, and I discover the impossibility of swallowing both it and my mother’s criticisms at the same time. I focus on the wad of bread first, and only when it is safely disposed of do I say, “What struck you as untrue?”

  My mother, who knows me as well as I know her, is prepared for this question. “Mind you, I don’t care how I myself am portrayed in your writings, but I do wish you wouldn’t give the impression that your father was a fool. I just pray no one sends it to him.”

  “I haven’t,” I assure her. “So if you don’t, I guess no one will.”

  “It could conceivably be reprinted,” she reminds me. “Has that occurred to you? The piece was well enough written. You have always been talented. I just wish you wouldn’t employ your talents in defense of falsehood. Often your subjects are trivial, and even then … you lack high seriousness, Henry. Weight, for want of a better word. There, I’ve said it. I don’t mean to hurt your feelings, but the truth is that there’s nothing more shallow than cleverness. You’ve become a clever man.”

  “I do it for the money,” I respond cleverly. My mother knows well what the Railton Mirror pays its contributors. But as she gathers up my plate and coffee cup, I see that she is seriously annoyed with me. My mother has always been the sort of woman whose emotional state can be intuited from the volume at which she rattles kitchen utensils. I appreciate this. I would not, believe me, wish my wife to be more like my mother, except that there is something reassuring about dealing with a woman whose emotional barometer can be read so easily. Lily, I sometimes regret, lacks my mother’s sense of drama. In Lily’s opinion rattling the china not only dramatizes anger but reduces anger to melodrama. My wife considers overtly dramatic behavior of the sort my mother has always relished undignified. And Lily is right, no doubt about it. But a man like me, who’s easily confused by women, prefers signposts with large lettering. My mother contains her own share of depths, but she’s willing to simplify, to offer unambiguous directions: GO … STOP … YIELD. William of Occam could follow such road signs, and so can I.

  “Are you still miffed that I’m not going with you to New York?” I venture.

  My mother turns from the sink where she’s rinsing our plates and saucers to study me. “No, Henry, I’m not still miffed that you’re not going to New York. I never was miffed about that, so I can’t very well still be miffed.”

  “Oh,” I smile at her, since she’s obviously miffed at something.

  “If you had a truck, or a reliable vehicle of any sort, it would be another matter, but you and that monstrosity you drive would be of no use to us. Instead of towing, we’d end up towed. No, your friend Charles Purty and I will do famously without your assistance. It’s time he got out of Railton, and you know how I love New York. True, I could wish for a more sophisticated escort. I’ve never entered the Russian Tea Room in the company of a man wearing cowboy boots and a shirt with metal buttons, but that can’t be helped …” Her voice trails off as she contemplates the scene she’s just conjured.

  “Call before you go,” I suggest, getting to my feet. “I read somewhere that it closed.”

  “The Russian Tea Room? Don’t be absurd.” But then, suddenly, she’s serious. Or a different kind of serious. “What worries me is t
hat you are in no way prepared for your father’s return.”

  This is such a puzzling thing to say that I can’t help but stare at her.

  “What I was in no way prepared for, Mother, was his departure,” I remind her. “These days, thank God, I could care less what he does and doesn’t do.”

  The expression she offers me now is my least favorite of all those in her vast arsenal of annoyingly superior looks, the one that says, “Who are you trying to kid, buddy-boy?”

  “What?” I say, feeling myself become more than a little heated.

  “Have it your way,” my mother says, and I see that I was wrong about her last expression being her most annoying. This sad, wry one she’s replaced it with is even worse.

  I consult my watch. “I have to go teach a class,” I remind her. In the Devereaux family, this obligation has always been the ace of trumps, and I can see how much my mother hates to see me play it now.

  “Oh, yes,” she recalls. “The one where everybody talks but you. I always forget what you call those.” My mother hasn’t forgotten what workshops are called, or that she disapproves of them. “Before you illuminate all those young minds with your eloquent silence, would you mind going down into the cellar and bringing up the smaller of my two suitcases?”

  I follow her to the cellar door, and when she flips the light switch, there’s a brief flash, followed by a distinct pop from the dark, nether regions of Charles Purty’s cellar. “Oh, phooey,” my mother says. “And I’m out of lightbulbs.”

  “Just leave the door open,” I suggest, since I’m pretty sure I can see the suitcase in question from the top of the stairs. “And step out of the light.”

  My mother does as she’s told, for once. “Be careful, Hank,” she says, touching my elbow and favoring me with the name she has always despised. “The stairs are in a frightful condition.”

  And I do as I’m told, for once, recalling, as I start to descend, my wife’s premonition that I may end up in the hospital while she’s gone, a prophecy I’m determined to thwart. The problem is that once I enter the stairwell I am blocking my own light, and everything below swims into darkness. I feel for the next step cautiously, like a man without much faith that there will be a next step, or that it will be where reason would place it. At first I can feel the walls on each side, but as I descend these fall away, and there is no handrail. “There,” I hear my mother say, “you’re on the bottom,” though how she can see this when I can’t is beyond me. She is right, though, I have reached the stone floor, and in another moment or two my eyes adjust. Feeling my way in the dark, I locate the handle of what feels like a suitcase, then another. I set what feels like the smaller of the two on the stair for my mother to inspect. “This one?”

  “Yes,” she says. “And while you’re there? Right next to the suitcases there should be two cardboard boxes marked ‘Memorabilia.’ ”

  “Step back out of the light,” I suggest, though I can see better now. The ceiling, not very far above my head, is a web of pipes, and I negotiate these carefully as I move around. There appear to be a dozen or so cardboard boxes in the vicinity, all of them labeled “Memorabilia” in my mother’s elegant hand.

  “Open the top one,” she suggests.

  I cart the top one over to the foot of the stairs so the light falls on it and open it up. “Photo albums,” I call up, though, wedged along the side of the box, something brightly colored catches my eye.

  “That’s the one,” my mother says. “Hand the suitcase up, then bring the box, if you will.”

  The brightly colored thing, once I’ve tugged it out, I recognize as the dog collar I purchased as a boy in the hope of convincing my parents to get me a dog to attach it to. I toss it up, so that it lands at my mother’s feet. “Ah, Red,” I say. “How I loved that dog.”

  “God, what a little pill you were,” my mother recalls nostalgically.

  “Here’s the suitcase.” I duck my head, go partway up the stairs, and hand it up. When my mother comes into view to receive it, backlit, a dark silhouette, something old washes over me so powerfully that I start to back away at the moment of transfer, and for a second I wonder if I’m going to pull my mother down the stairs after me. I lose track of how many steps up I’ve taken, and suddenly I’m lost, completely lost. Reaching up, I grab one of the pipes, the hot water one as luck would have it, and it’s this pipe that keeps me from going down.

  “Careful,” I hear my mother’s voice. “Are you all right?”

  It’s a good question. I seem to be. Was it dizziness or nausea that passed over me? Did I actually black out for a second? Now it’s my own voice I hear. “I just lost my equilibrium for a moment. I’m fine.”

  “Leave the box. Come on up,” she suggests.

  A moment later, I’m seated at the kitchen table. My mother is holding out a glass of Railton tap water, which no one was ever healthier for drinking. “You’re pale as a ghost,” she would have me know.

  “How old was that cheese spread?” I ask her.

  “Don’t go blaming my cheese spread,” I’m told. “I ate it too, and there’s nothing wrong with me.”

  “I really have to go teach,” I tell her, consulting my watch again. In fact, now that I’m out of the dank cellar and in the light, I feel fine.

  “Look at me,” she says.

  When I do, when I meet her puzzled eyes, I feel a slight aftershock, the trace effects of whatever it was that visited me in the cellar, and then it’s all gone and I’m myself again. My mother must agree, because she doesn’t argue.

  “You must be coming down with something,” she concludes on the porch, putting her hand on my chest when I lean forward to kiss her good-bye. Mr. Purty observes this from his own porch across the driveway. I wave at him on my way down the steps, and he waves back understandingly. He knows what it feels like not to be kissed.

  CHAPTER

  9

  Often, imagination isn’t everything it’s cracked up to be. I have imagined, for instance, how badly my afternoon seminar will go, and it’s gone that badly and then some. What occurs to me is this: if I’ve been smart enough to predict this disaster, I should have been able to prevent it. But imagination without energy remains inert, and my visit to my mother’s has left me strangely disoriented, made a disinterested observer of me. Normally I’m an amused observer, but there’s nothing all that amusing in today’s class. I wonder if my inability to see any humor represents progress of some sort. I am, after all, frequently accused of a lack of high seriousness. But this class can’t be progress toward anything. Apparently my students agree. They’re looking at each other as if they’re trying to remember what they were thinking back in January when they enrolled.

  Of course the trouble began before I arrived, provoked by the unfortunate Leo’s unwillingness to understate necrophilia. By the time I entered the classroom, the situation was already out of hand. A virulent young woman named Solange, who has coal black hair with an angry streak of white—her mean streak, as I’ve come to think of it—was in the process of observing that the reason Leo always writes about pussy is that he is one. He pretends to be some kind of Hemingway, but the truth is he’s a wimp, a wanna-be, a case of arrested development. Trouble has been brewing between these two all semester. For the last couple weeks she’s been saying things under her breath, and I’ve made the mistake of ignoring them. But there was no way to ignore this. When I asked Solange if she was finished, if we could begin our workshop of Leo’s story, she replied that she would be happy to begin it herself. The story, in her view, was more of this author’s incessant, sexist nonsense. Trash, without a single redeeming feature. She could see no use for it beyond kindling.

  Such remarks seldom stimulate discussion, and they have not done so here. Leo, his cheeks aflame, tried to summon his usual smug grin but failed. As the semester has progressed, it’s become more and more difficult for Leo to maintain his public posture, which is that he and I are, after a fashion, team-teaching the course. He
’s the only student taking the workshop a second time, and he’s intimated to his classmates that, of course, I hold him to a higher standard and that we have an unspoken understanding. Since he’s the only student on campus who’s properly obsessed with becoming a writer, I see it as my duty to push him harder than the others, to make sure he’s not ruined by too much praise. From the author interviews Leo devours, he has learned that about the worst thing that can happen to a talented young writer is to be given too much praise, so Leo is grateful to me for protecting him. I don’t know whether he’s grateful to the other students in the workshop, who have been even more determined than their instructor not to ruin him with too much praise. Or any praise.

  Right now, with the exception of Solange, they are all looking to me for guidance, aware that I don’t, as a rule, encourage the kind of in-your-face dismissal of someone’s labors that Solange has accorded Leo. There are two rules in my workshop, and most of the time these head off trouble. The first rule is that all comments and criticisms are to be directed at the manuscript and not its author. In return for this consideration, the author is not permitted to speak in defense of the manuscript.

  These are excellent, though fundamentally flawed, rules. The problem with the first is that what’s wrong with any given manuscript is often easily located in the personality or character of its author, as is the case with Leo’s story. Leo needs more than aesthetic and technical advice in short story writing. Leo needs, among other things, to get laid. His grim young face bears eloquent testimony to the fact that no young woman has ever been kind to him. His stories are a revenge on the lot of them. At this particular moment, having been branded a wimp, he’s a study in scarlet. In addition to his red hair and flushed face and long, pimply neck, two of the fingers of his right hand are bleeding at the cuticles. Throughout the winter his raw fingers have been full of hangnails. The tiny deltas of skin are always peeled back, like tomato skins, revealing the tender pulp beneath. I see that today it’s the index finger of his right hand he’s been excavating, and there are several bright pinpoints of blood at the cuticle for him to suck at, then examine secretly, as if he suspects the truth of his nature—that he’s red to the core.