Straight Man

by Richard Russo

  “Because you feel guilty and humiliated, a failure in marriage and life?”

  “Ah,” he says, staring straight ahead now. “You do understand why.”

  What I understand is that a bad thing is beginning to happen, one I might have predicted. Now that he’s not in Meg Quigley’s bed anymore, all my affection for Russell is returning at a gallop. I haven’t liked him this much since the day I thrashed him at basketball, since he made that wild, awkward, desperate hook shot and the ball landed on the roof, wedged in behind the backboard so that I had to climb up and get it, his new wife, my daughter, looking on.

  “I hope you don’t think my running you out of town means that I don’t like you, Russell,” I tell him. “This isn’t forever. I just think everything will be better if you leave town for a while. I know I’m going to feel a lot better.”

  “I just hope you don’t imagine I have plane fare to Atlanta.”

  I glance over at him and raise an eyebrow, as if to ask just how dumb he thinks I am.

  “Or money to live on when I get there,” he adds, sheepishly.

  “Don’t try to talk me out of this, Russell,” I warn him.

  We make the airport in record time. Russell puts up exactly no fuss. His only visible resentment of his father-in-law is manifested by his refusal to let me carry either of his bags.

  “I hate commuter flights,” he tells me after I’ve booked him on one to Pittsburgh, where he will connect with a direct flight to Atlanta. We’ve left the return open-ended. I write him a check for expenses. He studies it dubiously. “Stay someplace cheap,” I advise. “Call Julie when you get in.”

  “Really?”

  “Take my advice,” I say. “Tell her this was your idea. She’ll like you better.”

  “What are you going to tell her?”

  “I haven’t decided,” I say, though I have.

  Russell notices his flight is boarding, and he takes a deep breath. “I’m really scared of these little planes,” he confides, and I can see he’s not kidding.

  “You’re not going to die on this flight, Russell. You came closer to dying in bed this morning before you even woke up.”

  “Knowing how scared I am, you’re still going to make me do this?”

  “That’s right.”

  He shrugs, as if to say he’s not surprised. “Well, good-bye then.”

  We shake hands like two men who may never see each other again.

  “Meg told me she’d been flirting with you for a long time.”

  “She did, huh.”

  “She said you wanted to fuck her. She could tell.”

  “Really.”

  “She said you wanted to, bad.”

  “Not bad enough.”

  He nods. “That kind of hurt her feelings. I told her about your father, so she’d understand.”

  “So she wouldn’t misunderstand my stubbornness for virtue?”

  “Hey,” he says. “I never thought of it that way.”

  “Good luck in Atlanta,” I tell him, and I wish it for him, too. I wish for it with a hard, determined, childlike intensity. A prayer, almost.

  When he’s on the plane and the stewardess pulls up the stairs and locks the aircraft’s door, I immediately regret having done this. Russell is always good company, and I wish I had some for the trip home.

  CHAPTER

  33

  By noon, when I pull up to the curb in front of my mother’s place, she and Mr. Purty are just backing out of the driveway in his truck. Which means I’ve narrowly missed witnessing her climbing into it, something I feel sure would have cheered me up.

  “Hi, Mr. Purty,” I say, addressing the person who is nearest, who is also, I judge, the person gladdest to see me and most likely to be civil regardless. My mother’s stony expression conveys eloquently and with great economy several things: that she is put out with me, that she is frustrated, that she has been trying to call me, both at home and at the office, getting only my machine, which she hates.

  “Henry,” Mr. Purty says flatly. I understand his position. He can’t afford to appear too pleased to see a man in my mother’s dog-house.

  “Henry”—my mother leans across the seat—“I’d appreciate a word with you.”

  “I’m right here,” I tell her, since I am. But I know what she means. She doesn’t want to speak across Mr. Purty, given what she has to say. She wants me to come around to her side.

  “I’m crazy,” Patsy Cline tells the three of us. “Crazy for lovin’ you.” I go around to my mother’s side of the truck.

  “Do you have any idea how many times I tried to call you last night?”

  “I’m sorry,” I tell her. “I didn’t mean to worry you.”

  She frowns at me. “I wasn’t worried. I needed your help.”

  What I’d like to ask her is if she remembers after all these years what she promised we’d forget. My having at last disinterred the memory will seem doubly strange if it turns out my mother is unable or unwilling to dig it up herself. It’s the sort of knowledge I ought to be able to see in her eyes, but I can’t. Her frustration and annoyance with me is clear enough though.

  “The boxes that wouldn’t fit in the U-Haul have arrived at the post office. We’re going down to pick them up.”

  “Is he inside?” I ask.

  “Who?” she wants to know. “Are you acknowledging that you have a father? You’re actually deigning to pay him a visit?”

  “I wasn’t deigning, actually. Just stopping by. Maybe when the semester’s over there’ll be time for deigning.”

  She ignores this too. “He’s been wondering where you were since yesterday,” she informs me, which may or may not be true.

  “And here I am to satisfy his curiosity,” I point out. “We wondered where he was for close to a decade. Or have you forgotten.”

  Our eyes meet then, in earnest, for the first time in years, and yes there is something. “I have not forgotten,” she assures me. “I have merely forgiven. You should, too.”

  “How many times do we have to go through this, Mother?” I ask. “I told you, I bear the man no ill will.”

  “But that’s not the same as forgiving, is it?” She gives me her “significant” look, to indicate that I’d do well to chew on this distinction for a while.

  I sigh. “What is it that you want from me exactly?”

  “For now, I want to store the boxes in your garage,” she tells me. “Is that permissible?”

  “Sure,” I say, stepping back from the truck. “I wouldn’t go out there right now though. The house is surrounded by the media.”

  My mother closes her eyes slowly, then opens them again. “What will he make of you? I wonder,” she says.

  I wave good-bye to Mr. Purty, who puts the truck in gear. “Charles knows a great place for lunch,” I call after my mother before the window gets rolled up all the way. “Try the scrapple.”

  Inside, there’s a home renovation show on television. At first, my father appears to be watching it intently, but then I see that he’s dozed off in my mother’s reading chair. His repose has a ferocious quality to it, as if in his dream he’s anticipating some scholarly objection to his line of thinking and is preparing to make short work of it.

  Truth be told, it’s a little shocking to see him again. Especially in this context. The last few years have not been kind. For a long time my father’s aristocratic features were immune to the assault of time, but now everything seems to have caught up to him at once. A cursory glance tells you he’s had his last young lover, and I can’t help wondering if he feels relief in this knowledge. Since the late sixties he’s worn his hair long, a bright mane of flowing silver, though it’s gone a little yellow now, like stained teeth. What strikes me most is how womanish my father’s features have become, which makes me wonder if he looks a little like an old woman to my mother too.

  He awakens under my none-too-sympathetic gaze. “Henry,” he says, getting slowly to his feet, extending his hand.

/>   “Henry,” I reply. When we shake, his palm is dry, mine moist, though he seems not to notice.

  And then silence. This meeting of the two William Henry Devereauxs, the first in nearly a decade, not counting the one in the hospital after his collapse, when he was heavily sedated, must be rather like the fabled encounter between Joyce and Proust, when each professed ignorance of the other’s work and, that established, could think of nothing further to say. We both look at the television, as if for help.

  “They were talking about you earlier,” he says vaguely, no doubt referring to a morning news show. “Something to do with …” He shakes his head vigorously, as if the agitation will float what he’s searching for to the surface of his liquid memory. When it does, he can hardly believe it. “Ducks?” he says. Did he dream this?

  I concede that the subject could very well have been ducks, which seems to satisfy him. At least he knows he’s not going crazy. “Would you object to some fresh air?” he wonders, peeking at the sunny day outside my mother’s front windows. “She keeps it so dark in here,” he says, looking around at my mother’s world.

  He locates a cowl-necked sweater, and we go out onto the porch. “Is this a safe neighborhood?” he wonders, peering up and down both sides of the wide street.

  “You’re in small-town Pennsylvania, Dad,” I remind him.

  He’s got ahold of the porch railing for support and is staring off down the street in the direction of the old amusement park. The top of the Ferris wheel is just visible among the trees. “What’s that?” he wants to know, standing up straight.

  “The old midway,” I tell him.

  “Let’s go,” he says, and he starts down the steps before I can object, his silver mane all astir in the breeze. I can’t tell if he means to walk over and have a look at things or if he means to go on the rides when he gets there. For a man who’s suffered a major collapse, he’s still got a hell of a purpose to his stride. My own would normally be longer, but it’s shortened by what I’m now doubly convinced, here in the presence of William Henry Devereaux, Sr., X ray or no X ray, is a stone the size of a pearl, blocking the entryway to my ureter. I have all I can do to keep up with him. I keep thinking he’s going to tire, but he doesn’t, and five minutes at our brisk pace brings us near the shore of the lake. Or rather to what was once a lake and is now a muddy, foul-smelling declivity. From here we can see all of what was once the midway: its Ferris wheel, the abandoned building that once housed the carousel, the weed-infested go-cart track. This is about as far as it makes sense to go, but my father has already started off around the lake.

  “It’s gated, Dad,” I call after him, wondering what in the world he has in mind. To look at him, you’d swear he intended to drive a bumper car. “It’s all locked up to keep the kids out.”

  But around the lake we go, stopping only when we come to the chain-link fence. My father goes right up to it, puts his slender fingers through the wire links, and pulls the fence toward him. It looks for all the world like he intends to climb. “This is a terrible thing,” he says, staring at the empty carousel building. “Something like this should never be abandoned. What possesses people?”

  “Before the amusement park this was all public gardens,” I tell him. “They were famous. People rode the trains in from New York and Philadelphia to see them.”

  He studies my face to see if this can be true, then looks back at the midway, perhaps converting the present scene to gardens. “Beautiful women strolling everywhere, I imagine. Dressed to the nines. Young men trying to make an impression. Wonderful. Just wonderful. Are there books on the subject?”

  “On all this?” I say, scanning the lake, the midway. “No idea.”

  “There should be,” he says, letting go of the fence. Then again, “Wonderful.”

  I can see that he’s suddenly tired now, and when I suggest we rest before heading back, he’s all too glad. There’s a bench nearby.

  “Your mother says you’re going through a midlife crisis,” he observes. “You don’t look at all well.”

  “I’m terrific, Dad,” I assure him. “Never better, in fact.”

  He gives no indication of having heard, much less digested or believed this. “I had a turning point of my own when I was your age,” he says. “It was a true crisis of the soul, as I now conceive it.”

  I’m not surprised when he launches into the story of his lost voice the year he went to Columbia. It’s sweet, I suppose, for him to concede that I’m going through some kind of crisis worthy of comment by him. Perhaps his intention in telling the story of his early humiliation at Columbia is to make me feel less alone in my own predicament. “Crises of soul,” he means to suggest, are not uncommon to men like William Henry Devereaux, Senior and Junior. But before he gets very far into the story he’s lost his thesis, and his crisis-of-the-soul story starts getting illustrated with details that undermine his intention. He reminds me that his salary was enormous, unheard of at the time, that it paved the way for the salaries of today’s academic superstars, an entirely inferior breed. What would he be worth, in his prime, on today’s market? No English department in the country could afford him. Eventually, he does return to his story, but by the time he gets to his triumphal Dickens lecture, his scathing attack on Bleak House, it’s become nothing more than a story of personal triumph over adversity, of mind over body, intellect over larynx, scholarship over art. A story of vindication, of William Henry Devereaux, Sr., and his salary. I’m only half-listening to all of it, so I’m not entirely prepared when his narrative takes an unexpected turn. “You may find this strange,” he says, “but I’ve recently started rereading Dickens.”

  Clearly he imagines he’s paying the author a compliment by returning in his final years to a writer whose mawkishness he’s derided over a long career. “Much of the work is appalling, of course. Simply appalling,” my father concedes, genuflecting before his previous wisdom on the subject. “Most of it, probably. But there is something there, isn’t there. Some power … something”—he searches for the right word here—“transcendent, really.”

  It would be pointless for me to offer an observation, I know. This conversation he’s ostensibly having with me he’s really having with himself, and the truth is I can never remember having a conversation with him that wasn’t this way.

  “I feel almost,” he says, “as though I had sinned against that man.”

  This statement, it must be said, brings me to the brink of powerful emotion. It must be a hybrid of some sort, since sorrow and hilarity seem equally justifiable in this circumstance. “Dad,” I finally say, when I locate my voice. “This is what you feel guilty about? You feel guilty about the way you treated Dickens?”

  He nods without hesitation. “Yes,” he says, then again, “yes.”

  I think it’s me he’s looking at as he says this until I realize his focus is somewhere behind me, on the abandoned carousel, perhaps, or maybe he’s with Pip and Joe Gargery at the forge. At which point something happens to his face. It seems almost to come apart, and then tears are streaming down his cheeks, exactly as Mr. Purty described. “I wish …,” he begins, but he’s unable to continue. He’s too overcome with grief.

  CHAPTER

  34

  My fiction writers seem to have remembered the morose silence that ended our last workshop, and then to have concluded that we should pick up where we left off, despite Leo’s surprising absence. Not only does Leo never miss class, he usually arrives early and paces in the hallway, hoping to have a few words with me beforehand, a strategy I defeat by arriving exactly one minute after the bell and pointing at the clock face at the end of the hall. And after he’s had a story work-shopped, he always arrives at the next class loaded for bear. I’d have thought that would be especially true today, since a story of Solange’s is up for discussion.

  Perhaps Leo’s taken Hemingway’s advice. Earlier in the term he explained to me why Hemingway would have disapproved of our workshop. Hem advised young wr
iters to live. He derided the whole idea of writing groups and talking about writing. He certainly wouldn’t have approved of the contemporary workshop concept. When Leo explained all this to me, I seriously considered agreeing with him, since that would have implied that he’d be better off to drop the class and move into a log cabin in the mountains with an old typewriter and a couple reams of paper. Instead I reminded Leo that when the young Hemingway was living in Paris, he wrote in the morning and spent his afternoons talking writing with Gertrude Stein and Sherwood Anderson in what may have been the world’s first and best workshop. My reward for setting Leo straight was, of course, another semester’s worth of his slasher stories.

  It may be that today’s workshop is less impeded by Leo’s absence than by my presence. William Henry Devereaux, Jr., appears to have taken over today’s workshop at several levels. Not only am I seated at the head of the table, but I’m also beneath it. Whereas yesterday I was above things, peeking down at my colleagues from the gap between the ceiling tiles, today literally nothing is beneath me. When I entered the classroom, several of my students hastily folded up their campus newspapers, dropping them to the floor so that their professor could stare up at them from shoe level. I am pictured on the front page, and unless I’m mistaken several of my apprentice writers are dealing with the oppressive classroom silence by grinding their heels into my wry, smiling countenance. It occurs to me that I’m experiencing my father’s classroom dilemma in reverse. It’s my students who are speechless.

  After returning a weeping William Henry Devereaux, Sr., to my mother’s flat, I’ve arrived on campus with just enough time before my workshop to skim the newspaper in the relative privacy of the men’s room stall on the first floor of Modern Languages. Thanks to the demise of yesterday’s duck and my growing celebrity, the story detailing the incident in Tony Coniglia’s classroom has been pushed back to page two below the fold. Thankfully, there’s no photo of Tony, or of Yolanda Ackles. Unfortunately, the paper did print the young woman’s claim that she and her former professor were lovers, that in her belief Professor Coniglia was God, that he spoke to her through dreams and fevers. June Barnes, as chair of the sexual harassment-professional conduct committee, assured the campus reporter that the incident was under investigation, though she noted that the young woman in question had a history of mental illness. What did June think of the young woman’s allegations? Well, she had known Professor Coniglia for twenty years and could say with confidence that he was not God. When asked if she considered Professor Coniglia to be one of those professors who regarded undergraduate women as a “pool of potential sexual partners,” a reference to an opinion piece printed in the campus magazine June edits, she offered a damning no comment. Still, given the standards of the campus newspaper, this is relatively high-road coverage.