Handling Sin

by Malone, Michael

  From his gilded box seat near the gold proscenium arch, a young American drama professor named Theo Ryan leaned forward, his hand pressing the rolled playbill against the starched, white pleats of his shirt front. On the small, brocaded chair beside him sat Dame Winifred Throckmorton, the retired Oxford don who had discovered Foolscap. And in the chairs in front sat the elegant Earl and Countess of Newbolt, smiling vaguely down at the crowd that gazed with careful nonchalance up at them. The earl was one of the owners of the play they were all about to see. Theo Ryan had been invited along as an interested friend.

  “Scared, kid?” he heard a voice ask. “Me, I could never sit down at my premieres. Darted around like an old bobcat loose in the lobby till they ran me off.”

  Theo recognized the soft, slurred southern voice of the great American playwright Joshua “Ford” Rexford. The two of them had had years of such stage-talk conversations together.

  Ford’s voice said, “It’s a hit, Theo. I could always tell.” “Oh, Ford,” Theo thought. “No, you couldn’t.”

  “You’ll see. You can breathe it. Come on, Theo, this is why I

  brought you all the way over here. For this. Take a sniff of triumph.”

  606 • foolscap All around him, murmuring hushed as hundreds of lights in the jeweled chandeliers dimmed. Theo turned sideways in the little chair, rested his arms on the gilt railing, looked down at the stage, and as the great velvet drapery of the curtain rushed upward, he breathed deeply in.

  Theodore Ryan had never before watched a play’s premiere from a gilded box seat or, for that matter, from any seat in the audience of a theater. Oh, he’d seen many shows open and many shows close, hundreds and hundreds of shows from his earliest childhood on, but he’d seen them all from a backstage vantage point; his view of the drama had always been that peripheral view from the wings. For both his parents had worked all their lives in show business.

  His mother, Lorraine Page, had performed in five Broadway musicals, in nine national tours, and in eighty-four stock companies. Theo’s favorite childhood year had been the one when she had stayed home in New York to appear live on television once a week as the Luster Shampoo Girl. His father had traveled the entire country by bus more than a dozen times, singing his two gold record hits, “Prom Queen” and “Do the Duck.” Benny Ryan had been a minor teenage idol, and had made it all the way to No. 3 on the rock and roll charts with “Do the Duck,” which had started a short-lived dance craze. Lorraine had given birth to Theo in a small town between Nashville (where she was starring in South Pacific) and Atlanta (where Benny was scheduled to open for Elvis Presley at the fairgrounds).

  Theo Ryan’s early life had felt to him like one disorienting blur of grimy backstage corridors, interchangeable hotel rooms, and tacky restaurant lounges. He had never celebrated his birthday in the same place two years running, had never owned a bicycle, and had never lived in a house—until the house he’d bought for himself. He had bought this home near the university in the mountains of North Carolina where he’d taken his first teaching job and where he had hoped to remain, on the same campus, in the same small town of Rome, for as long as half a century without ever being compelled to move so much as the wobbly metal lamp on the scratched and inkstained desk in his office.

  prologue • 607 And so young Professor Ryan, although a scholar of the English Renaissance, had never even visited England until brought there by an odd set of circumstances that had led him to this theater in the London West End, to this gilt and velvet box belonging to the Earl and Countess of Newbolt, to this seat beside Dame Winifred Throckmorton, who, like him, caught her breath as the curtain rose on Foolscap.

  Lights blazed down on the set’s dazzling, metallic complexity, and the audience began to applaud. Theo heard Ford Rexford say, “You did it, kid.”

  Theo whispered aloud. “You’re as responsible for this as I am.” “Rubbish,” Dame Winifred whispered back, rapping Theo’s shoulder with her thin, bent fingers. “I bear no responsibility at all. Your ‘Destiny,’ Theo… And, of course, Walter Raleigh’s.”

  “Shhh!” hissed an indignant lady in the box next to theirs, with a pointed nod at the stage, where the play was beginning. With a smile of apology, Theo turned toward the lights, his heart rising inside him. Breathless, he held his cupped hands to his lips—just as he had done long ago when a small boy, when he had first stood backstage in the dim, bustling wings of a theater somewhere on the road in America and watched a heavy, frayed, patched, gilded curtain fall at some summer-stock play’s end, watched it slowly close between the bowing forms of his parents Lorraine Page and Benny Ryan onstage and the sharp, echoing sound of strangers applauding out there in the dark.

  Chapter 1

  Whispers

  CHERBURTYKIN[softly says]:

  Ta-ra-ra boom-de-ay, sit on the curb all day…. It doesn’t matter! It doesn’t matter.

  OLGA:

  If only we knew, if only we knew.

  [The End]

  —Three Sisters, Chekhov On an April afternoon, Theo Ryan sat impatiently in Ludd Lounge thinking of endings. Exit lines. Curtain speeches. And as he thought, he was doodling. Swagged, tasseled, gilt-bordered, grand proscenium curtains, act drop, asbestos, teasers. He added wing drapes; in theatrical parlance—tormenters. Why tormenters? A pun? Polysemy signifying, of course, other signifiers—or so would have claimed his famous colleague Jane Nash-Gantz, the psychoanalytically inclined deconstructionist, had she bothered to attend these faculty meetings, which, of course, she rarely did. He tied bows to the tormenters, and centerstage added a stick figure with a noose around its neck. It was still five minutes till four.

  He had drawn the curtains in a homeopathic hope of bringing to an exit line the homily on “saving the canon” now being droned at them by Dr. Norman Bridges, earnest and unwilling chairman of the English Department until his successor could be elected. Bridges had just passed the half-hour mark, by no means a record at these gatherings in the Dina Sue Ludd Lounge.

  Theo had stopped himself from drawing faces. They’d twisted into grimacing psychotics with hair like corkscrews and lidless eyes that spiraled into wider and wider circles of blind, black madness. Oedipal, no doubt. Nearby, his worst enemy, medievalist Marcus Thorney, leaned surreptitiously to peek at the page of scribbles, contempt flickering over his angular, saturnine face. Theo crooked his arm around the legal pad and turned his back. It had to be acknowledged that his doodlings these days tended toward the turbulent. Interesting (as his therapist annoyingly pointed out) that there should be such spasms of violence in so placid a person as Theo Ryan at least claimed to be. He added a trapdoor to his sketch.

  Going into the meeting, Dr. Bridges had whispered in the doorway that he’d “like a word about something, Theo. Coffee afterwards?” Ryan had a good idea about what. The chairman would say again that Dean Tupper was still looking for a dynamic young man to run the university’s new theater center, and that he, Dr. Bridges (he occasionally referred to himself in the third person as Dr. Bridges), thought Theo Ryan should be that man.

  Then Theo would say again, “Not me. I’m not a director, not a playwright; I don’t know lights, sets, any of it.”

  And Bridges would flutter his hands. “So? You know the theater!”

  And he would say, “Thanks anyhow, Norman, but the truth is, I like my theater on the page, not the stage.”

  Bridges would sigh. “Theo, Theo, how can someone with your background feel that way?”

  And he would say, “That’s why.”

  Actually, Theo had fudged the truth even in this hypothetical conversation; since adolescence, he had been a closet playwright and he’d written at least one play that he’d thought good enough to keep, one full, three-act play. The others, he’d destroyed the night he read The Cherry Orchard. This single saved work, completed in a summer workshop, was still in his bottom desk drawer. But not a soul knew about his creation except for one person—a famous director named Scottie Smith—and Theo w
as sorry he’d ever allowed that monstrous individual to get his hands on it. The memory even now sent his pencil gouging through the eyehole of a sketched mask of tragedy. Marcus Thorney’s brow arced into a suspicious position and superciliously stayed there. Thorney, who wanted to be the new department chairman, suspected his colleagues of plotting against him, which several of them were.

  “I don’t disagree with you younger people,” Chairman Bridges hemmed and hawed to his assembled faculty. “Perhaps we do need changes in our literary canon.”

  “We do!” someone shouted.

  “And perhaps we do need a superstar of some sort here.”

  “We don’t!” someone shouted.

  “I’m only,” Bridges sighed, “pointing out that my generation of scholars lived in a smaller, slower, and no doubt a less dazzling world. But perhaps I don’t disagree with our older colleagues when they claim ours was somehow a…deeper world.”

  EDGAR:

  We that are young, Shall never see so much, nor live so long.

  —King Lear

  FINIS, thought Theo. Nowhere near finis, Bridges rambled on, comparing the academic past and future—to, in the parlance, a dead house. Theo and his colleagues at least sat bored in comfort: for the lounge they sat in was the centerpiece of their newly renovated Ludd Hall, one of the finest buildings on the campus of Cavendish University, the “fastest growing college in the South.” The hall’s donor, Mrs. Ludd—to judge from her glazy eyes in the big, oval oil painting above the silk-striped couch—was as dazed by Dr. Bridges’s monologue as everyone else clustered at one end of her vast, neoclassical faculty salon.

  Ripping the sheet from his legal pad, Theo stretched a long arm down the conference table and flicked the ball of yellow paper. It bounced into the trash off the arm of the rotund young black woman next to him, his friend Jorvelle Wakefield, African Americanist, who was startled out of a comatose trance. She mugged a theatrical sneer at him and muttered, “Honkie.”

  Stuffing the cuff of his flannel shirt in his mouth, he dampened the cloth with a yawn. Black fuzz stuck to his tongue, and he wiped the sleeve on his corduroy pants. At least he wasn’t asleep like Romantic Poetry and Victorian Novels, who always sat amiably slumped together in the shadows of the mustard-colored Empire couch against the wall, where they catnapped until nudged to leave. The lazy April sun hazing through the western windows, coupled with the unhurried hum of the chairman, was enough to lull into a snooze faculty far younger than those two grizzled venerables, who were now shoulder to shoulder in the middle of the couch, their foreheads nearly touching, like shy old lovers. Even the foot-jiggling and finger-thrumming of Jonas Marsh, the hyperkenetic Restoration specialist, had slowed to a languid tremor; coffee was not sloshing, pencils were not rolling off the cherrywood conference table as they usually did in Marsh’s vicinity.

  Theo was one of the most junior of the senior professors here in the lounge—three of whom had voted with Marcus Thorney against him when he’d come up for tenure last fall. He knew exactly who those three were because Steve Weiner (Southern Fiction) had rushed straight to his house the minute the voting was over and blabbed the results. Steve had yelled the score right from the car, his bushy, black beard descending with the lowered window glass. He’d bellowed, “You got tenure! Know what they used to give you with tenure here? Your own personal plot in the Cavendish cemetery! I’m not kidding, tenure is forever.”

  Steve Weiner was Theo’s oldest friend at Cavendish. He was a Jew from Brooklyn, whose fatal weakness for Southern fiction and department politics had now held him hostage eleven years in the boondocks of the North Carolina hills. When Steve had heard about the arrival for a job interview of a theater scholar who had lived at least some of his life in Manhattan and whose mother, at least, was Jewish, he’d driven to the airport and hugged Theo Schneider Ryan right there at the baggage-claim carousel.

  That was seven years ago. Their friendship had flourished; now they were pointed out on campus tours as Doctors Mutt and Jeff: Steve, short and wiry, explosively gesticulating in that barrage of caustic aggressiveness with which he’d at first asked people in Rome for directions. (As a result of which, he’d rarely received any answers from locals, who couldn’t understand his fast Yankee patois anyhow.) Theo, with his long limbs and his long hands and feet, mildly nodding as he loped along beside his friend. The two were a Cavendish landmark. They’d seen each other through Steve’s divorce and through the recent breakup of Theo’s three-year affair with a woman in Art History. They’d settled in. They even rooted for the football team.

  Far from explosive this afternoon, Steve Weiner sat upright and motionless in a Windsor chair, his eyes fixed. He appeared to be either enchanted or dead. Theo lifted two fingers at him in salutation, but there was no response. Noticing them, Marcus Thorney lowered thin eyebrows over baleful eyes. Theo and Jorvelle Wakefield were supporting their friend Steve Weiner in the upcoming election for the new chairman. Three supporters of Marcus Thorney glared at them. One of the ancients gargled in his sleep.

  Portly Dr. Bridges was passing out another of his lengthy packets of material for discussion. “And so I think we all think it’s time,” he bobbed, his plump pink features a grin of feverish collegiality above his round collar and paisley tie, “that we here in the English Department at Cavendish need to step forward, to leap forward, I should say, with both our feet, into the eighties.”

  As the year was now 1989, no one could dispute that, indeed, if ever, the time to move into the eighties was now. Jorvelle let her elbow jerk off the table in a parody of falling asleep.

  Dr. Bridges was pointing to the oval painting with a respectful bow. “Thanks to the wonderful generosity of Mrs. Ludd…” No one bothered to look at her. “The window of opportunity is ours. What happened to History can, and must, and will happen to us.” Everyone in Ludd Hall was painfully aware of what had happened to History, and of the cankerous jealousy felt by Dr. Bridges as a result.

  Six short years ago, a Georgia insecticide king, Class of ’57, dying of emphysema, had donated thirty-five million dollars in order to bring renowned historians to Cavendish University so that they might, in the words of the bequest, “teach the great lessons of America’s past to the leaders of the world’s future.” By lavish offers of fat salaries, little or no teaching, luxurious, subsidized travel junkets, and office suites designed by I. M. Pei, the lucky History Department had promptly hired a handful of celebrity scholars from around the Ivies. As a result, they were soon ranked in the top ten nationwide in three separate polls prominently framed in their gleaming new lobby. Four falls back, they’d soared into the top five by luring Herbert Crawford, superstar Marxist, from Oxford (from Oxford!, as Bridges moaned in his nightmares) by agreeing to build the renowned cultural materialist a lap pool in his basement. The pool was now in a lakefront chalet the school had helped the Britisher purchase by picking up the tab for the interest on his mortgage payments. They’d also agreed to fly his wife over from England one weekend a month for conjugal visits (though so far no one had seen her). Dr. Crawford—Herbie to his students—wore black leather pants and jackets with a T-shirt to all college functions; he taught only one course a term, the hugely popular “Modern Capitalism: Origins to Collapse,” during which he interpreted the great lessons of the American past in ways the dead insecticide king probably had not anticipated.

  When the rating polls had first appeared, the provost of the university, Dean Buddy Tupper, Jr., had outraged English further by not only giving History a dozen new fellowships with which to hire graduate students to grade all their professors’ papers and exams for them, but by handing over to History, during the Pei construction, the entire fourth floor of the English Department building itself. While at the time, this floor had been unused except as a place to store mildewed zoology exhibits—fish fossils, stuffed otters, pig fetuses in formaldehyde—still, English was incensed by the injustice of such rank favoritism.

  Weak with indigna
tion and envy, Dr. Bridges, till then a timorous man, had forced himself to crawl on his knees (his wife’s phrase) to Dina Sue Ludd, granddaughter of the college founder, recent widow of a canned-goods mogul, and passionate believer in the study of Literature, her own major way back when. In the most successfully seductive moment of his fifty-five years (his wife, Tara, had seduced him while he was preoccupied writing his dissertation), Norman Bridges persuaded Mrs. Ludd to give the English Department forty million dollars in installments to be doled out by her cousin Buddy Tupper, so that English could hire academic stars to outshine in the polls those of History. Tupper told them they had two years to make appointments to three Ludd Chairs, as the richly endowed posts were to be called, and that they were to “make them good and visible, too.” Mrs. Ludd specified that two of the chairs should be, as she was herself, female, and that the third might be, if they chose, “a creative sort.”

  English had gotten off to an excellent start. Flush from his conquest of Mrs. Ludd, Bridges flew north that first Christmas to the Modern Language Association’s annual convention at a pitch of invincibility so intense it made him (according to his wife) almost sexy, and went looking for visible women. (At the time, there were no senior women in the Cavendish department and had been none since the death of Miss Mabel Chiddick, M.A., chair from 1938 to 1957, Beowulf to Milton, and the retirement of her longtime companion, Dr. Elsie Spence, Ph.D., Rape of the Lock to Sandburg.)

  Chairman Bridges’s extraordinary coup at that crowded holiday convention was to lure a consensus out of his senior faculty (inebriated into a rare fellowship by three days of nonstop drinking at open bars hosted by all the other English departments in the country). Miraculously, this hitherto utterly divisive group voted to let him make two Ludd Chair offers. And astonishingly, Bridges got those offers accepted out from under the noses of Harvard and Yale by two senior women. (These women were senior in status only, not in years; a fact which rankled some of the elder males back home at Cavendish—as poor Bridges was later to discover.) One of these women was Jane Nash-Gantz (author of five collections of her own essays, editor of seven collections of essays by her friends, and winner of the N. B. C. C. criticism prize for The M/other Self: Discourses of Gender de/Construction). She was only thirty-nine. The other was Jorvelle Wakefield (top draft-pick out of her graduate school, with twenty-seven job interviews and twenty job offers; author of Black on Black: African-American Literary Theory since Watts, and subject of a Bill Moyers program). She had reportedly just turned thirty. Somehow Norman Bridges, who could rarely talk his wife into anything, had talked both these women into moving to Rome, North Carolina, and teaching at Cavendish. How he did it was anybody’s guess—and most of the guesses were in the six figures, and bitter.