Final Exam

by Kluge, P. F.

  “...and if you cannot prosper in a class you do not attend, it’s equally true that I cannot prosper in a class which is interrupted by late-arriving students. If I can be here on time, you can be here on time. This is not New York where subways break down between stations. It’s also not Paris, where you might fall in love on the way to class, whether with a person or a painting or a city. This is a residential college on an obscure hilltop in central Ohio. If you belong here at all, you belong in class on time. Any questions? Have I said anything you don’t understand?”

  There are no questions. They can’t raise their hands. They’re in shock, it looks like to me. Wright takes them back to a time when teachers could scare you. He’s a regular throwback. So am I. He scares me.

  “This course involves close examination of major works by American historians and thinkers,” Wright is saying. “Francis Parkman. Frederick Jackson Turner. Charles Beard. W.E.B. DuBois. Thorstein Veblen. Henry James. Vernon Parrington. W.J. Cash, to name some. These are writers whose work combines historical importance and literary merit. It is fair to say that they have stood the test of time. So far, at least. But that doesn’t mean that they haven’t—should not have been—tested. Here, in this class, the testing continues. And, while I speak of tests...”

  Wright moves out from behind the podium, stepping in front. Every minute in class, he gets a little more pumped. In front of me, a woman draws three airplanes, three of them, each one for a Wright brother: Orville, Wilbur and Hiram.

  “I will require three papers of ten pages,” Wright says. “These papers should reflect your best efforts, on a topic of your own devising. I accept no late papers. I accept no revisions. I reserve the option of giving a final examination, on the chance that your papers have not sufficiently informed me of your abilities and efforts. I suspect they will have done just that.”

  It’s clear Professor Wright’s going to lecture the full fifty minutes, even on the first day of class, when students show up hoping the professor will breeze in, check registration, pass out a syllabus and leave early so everyone can enjoy what’s left of summer. Now he stands in class, five minutes left on the clock. He’s been working hard, setting his rules. No baseball hats, no food in class. Computer breakdowns, broken alarm clocks, power outages are no excuse. Drama club, job interview, swim meet, no excuse. Homesickness, lovesickness, attention deficit disorder, eating disorder, reading disorders, sorry. Broken spell checker, sorry.

  “You may be smarter than I am. But I’ve been smart longer. I was your age when I read these books for the first time. I taught them for thirty years and every time I taught them, I re-read them. I have changed. The world’s changed. And—in ways I look forward to sharing with you—the books have changed as well. Now I unexpectedly confront these books for what will surely be the last time. And the first for you. If all this interests you, welcome. If not...so be it. If you have any questions, I will answer them here, after class. Good morning, everyone.”

  “No fucking way,” I hear a student whisper as he gets up. Others feel the same way, seeing how they bomb out the door. They’ll go catalogue shopping for a new course. But not all of them run away, not by any means. First one, then two and three approach the podium, students who’ve waited until it’s just me and them alone with Wright. When they’re close enough, he greets them. He leans forward as they introduce themselves, gives them his hand to shake. He’s cordial and old-fashioned. He makes appointments for office hours, scribbles in his date book. Then he sees me there, waiting to talk to him.

  “So you decided to come,” Professor Wright says. “I’m delighted.”

  “I’d like to try,” I say and I take a syllabus. “Up to Mr. Graves, though.”

  “Try again, isn’t it?” he says. I stand there, not knowing what to say. There’s no telling how he knows I was a student here. I was hardly worth remembering. Then again, he was the smartest man for miles around.

  “Professor Wright?” It’s clumsy shifting from student to cop. “There’s something else... there’s a name came up and we’d like to know more about it.” Wright shoots me a look that tells me he knows what’s coming. I don’t prolong things. “Gerald Kurt Garner.”

  He nods, picks up his papers and packs them into a leather satchel that has stickers from hotels that are probably out of business in countries that don’t exist anymore. We walk across campus to the history department. Just walking is an effort for him. In class, I forgot—maybe he forgot—that he used a cane but now he needs it. It takes a while. History has its own house across campus. When the college enrollment tripled in the seventies, departments got spun off into what used to be professors’ homes. All those old comfortable houses, white clapboard and slate-roofed, were cut up into rooms and offices. The porches where faculty sipped sherry in good weather are littered with cigarette butts these days.

  Wright opens the door to an office where his name is thumbtacked next to Martha Yeats’ name plate: MS. YEATS. Inside, it’s still her office, her books and cartoons and post-its, her flowers and posters and box of Kleenex.

  “I hope this isn’t what I think it is,” Wright says, wincing as he settles in a chair and tries getting comfortable, which means grabbing his pants leg, raising his left leg and putting it on top of a drawer he pulls out of his desk.

  “We don’t know what it is yet,” I say.

  “What it is is an ugly story with a lovely beginning and a troubled middle and...well I don’t suppose we know the ending.”

  “No sir, that’s what we’re after.”

  “Don’t make me go through it from the start, Billy. I’m sure you know some things already.”

  “Up to the point he applied for a position here. I get the idea you wanted him to take your place.”

  “Yes,” Wright says. “That was the idea. So we could overlap a bit. Share the experience.” The desk he sits at is at right angles to the back wall of the office. Now he rearranges himself. All I can see is the back of his head as he looks out the window.

  “We don’t get many students like Gerald Garner anymore,” he says. “We never did, at the best of times. Those kids you saw this morning, they’re second and third generation college kids. It’s in their genes. Familiarity. Entitlement. Of course you go to college. It’s what you do, after high school, prep school. What college? City or country? Big or little? Warm climate or changing seasons? It’s not an education. It’s a lifestyle choice. Garner was utterly different. Thrilled to be here. Anxious. Hungry. When I gave him a C on his first paper he came to my office, worried about flunking out of college, breaking his parents’ hearts, letting down neighbors, teachers, high school coach, hometown librarian. How about that?” Wright laughs but it’s a sad kind of laugh, the kind you laugh when the joke’s on you.

  “I’ve had smarter students. Tenured professors, now, six of them. They were good at the start. Excellent. The marvelous thing about Garner was that he got better in front of me, year to year. I saw it happen. I made it happen. And it happened on all fronts, all classes, everything he touched. He got the Rhodes. A crowning achievement. Then graduate school. We kept in touch. We were friends for life. Letters, phone calls, visits. He loved coming back here. It was mystical, it was almost holy, this place was to him. What he missed, I’m afraid, was how the college was changing. I wasn’t the dominant figure in the history department anymore...”

  “Who was?” I ask.

  “Nobody in particular. Everybody...” Wright stops again. “I wish I’d persuaded him to apply to other places. But he’d be back here sooner or later, he insisted, so why not sooner? Well, he applied to this and only this place and of course he made the list of candidates invited here for campus interviews. He was the first to come. So far, things were going well, but I sensed something happening. Office doors closing more often in the history department. References to meetings, consultations, caucuses, phone calls that ended when I approached. At department mail boxes, a heavy traffic in envelopes marked ‘confidential
.’ Then it happened—the day before Garner was scheduled to arrive, an e-mail from Martha Yeats. ‘This search will have failed if it does not result in the hiring of a minority and/or female candidate.’ Some of my colleagues vapored about ‘the best available candidate.’ Most agreed outright, from the outset, with Martha. Garner’s return was doomed. He came. I wish I had told him not to. He lectured. He dined. He taught a sample class. He met the provost and the president and it was all just fine. He was a stronger candidate than even I had realized. Martha and her crew knew better than to attack him directly. She also saw that time was on her side. The first candidate to visit is at a disadvantage. He—or she—becomes a benchmark, an adequate hire, a known quantity—and simply by continuing the search you build a consensus that, well, we might do better, we can do better, we must do better. Meanwhile, impressions fade. His energy, his presence, his humor and grace, all of it, damned with faint praise. Let’s see what’s out there, we owe it to ourselves, to the department, the college, the profession. So they interviewed the first three candidates and brought in three more and not one was as good as Garner and they knew it...”

  “So who’d they hire?”

  “No one. That year. The next year they had another search. He got the message. He didn’t reapply.”

  “You spoke about it with him?”

  “Yes. But it spoke for itself. End of an era. End of the old boy network. End of me.”

  “Where did he wind up?”

  “It was about me,” Wright says, ignoring my question. “One Hiram Wright was enough. Two was too many. What happened to Garner was my fault. I knew it. So did he, I’m afraid. I wrote dozens of recommendations for him. All sorts of places. I was surprised he didn’t do better. He always got interviews. But not offers, not good ones. Fill-ins, sabbatical replacements. That’s what happens if you don’t get a tenure track. You’re a migrant worker. You kill yourself in front of classes of forty or fifty, with no benefits, no prospects. They grind you down. And meanwhile, the graduate schools keep turning out job candidates whose credentials are fresher, whose theses are more fashionable. After this went on for a while, I told Garner his preoccupation with academe—and with this particular academy—and even with me—was misplaced. Months passed. Then there came a postcard. A view of the college on the front. On the back in a handwriting I recognized: ‘Fuck it.’”

  “Do you think he’s our man?” I ask.

  “I wonder,” Wright says. It sounds like a yes answer. “Why kill Martha Yeats? There are a thousand Marthas out there. But there was only one of me. And I was the most to blame.”

  “Where’s Mr. Graves?” Hartley Fuller wanted to know. He was my next stop. A week had passed since I talked to Wright. Graves had made it clear that G-Man had low priority. No priority. In the meantime, I drove him around, to courthouses and law offices, to banks and county offices in Columbus, up in Cleveland and Mansfield. I waited for him in lobbies and parking lots, drove him where he wanted to go. He hardly ever talked about what he was doing and his only questions were about local stuff—who owned what farm, what land was selling for, things like that which he could pick up from anyone. That’s the kind of partners we were.

  “He had other duties,” I said, not having the least idea what Graves was up to. Some days, he just stayed in his motel room.

  “And you’re the one to interview me?” Fuller asked. He had some industrial strength doubts. What correspondence course did I take, that entitled me to go one-on-one with the chair of the college history department?

  “Yes, sir,” I said. “At Mr. Graves’ request.”

  “Well then...” he said.

  “There’s just one question, Professor,” I said. “And it’s three words long.” That got his interest.

  “Well, let’s hear it.”

  “Gerald Kurt Garner.”

  “That’s a name. Not a question.”

  “It’s a question. It’s a name with a wiggle at the end, that’s a question mark. I think you can take it from there.”

  “Alright,” he said. I’d asked about Gerald Kurt Garner. But the man Fuller started in on was Hiram Wright. “What becomes a legend most?” he asked. And answered: “Timely retirement.” Stribling and Wright, the college legends. Stribling had the decency to step aside but Wright stayed forever, ‘professing but not progressing, indifferent when not hostile to change.’ In his last years he withdrew from departmental affairs, so that many important changes had begun without him. The problem was—and this was difficult to admit—he still characterized the department. He was the name people mentioned. “Oh, that’s Hiram Wright’s place.” Sometimes his colleagues wondered how long it would take to shed that Hiram Wright reputation. How many years? Would time, alone, do the trick? Hiram was hostile to co-education, to team-taught courses, interdisciplinary studies, current scholarship, whole new fields of endeavor, post-colonial, gender, structuralism, post-structuralism. I could hardly keep up, taking notes on what I half-understood, nodding my head in appreciation. Once he got over talking to the likes of me, Fuller just rolled along, only pausing to let me catch up in my note-taking, because he didn’t want anything he said to be lost. Even after Hiram Wright withdrew from the department, Fuller said, leaving his colleagues to “their own devices,” the old man still impeded progress. He was hostile to films in class. He was hostile to junior years abroad. He had his doubts about change in the profession, about the importance of research, the role of theory. When visitors came to campus, lecturers and politicians, it was Hiram Wright they wanted to meet, was there any chance that the old man would be coming to their lecture? And in May, it was unbearable to see alumni coming in to pay their respects. They filled the hall in their springtime togs, their Docker slacks and golf shirts, waiting to hear how the college was doing, wanting to hear from Wright of all people, the person most out of touch, the least-informed, the sworn enemy of new methods and new ideas. Harry Stribling had the good grace to die on cue. Hiram stuck around, a bone in the throat of the history department, that they couldn’t swallow and couldn’t spit out.

  “What about Garner?” I asked.

  “I’m there,” Fuller said. “We decided it wasn’t appropriate to have Hiram Wright imposing his will...his candidate...on this department. Martha took the lead. It was her second year here. She came to me, quite bravely. We talked to some of our colleagues...”

  “Garner came to campus, didn’t he? For the interview and all?”

  “I felt sorry for him, to tell the truth,” Fuller said. “He was a well-turned out fellow. I wasn’t here in his student days, as a matter of fact, none of us had been. There’s a lesson there, too, by the way. When Hiram Wright was Mr. History at this college, every other department member was a bit player, a spear-carrier. A transient. Only room for one star.”

  “And Garner?”

  “He should never have been here. If he looked bad, he failed. If he looked good, well, we knew we didn’t want to hire someone Hiram Wright inspired and sponsored.”

  “How’d he look?”

  “Good, I’d have to say. The sample class, the lecture, all the social meetings. Fine, in a Hiram Wright way. It was a little sad, how he emulated the old man. The same old-school formality—hard to do for an Ohio kid—the approach to students, the way of leaving a question hanging in the air, even the way he quoted Hiram, as if that would thrill us all.”

  “What I don’t get is...you didn’t hire anybody that year...as far as I can tell.” You know that look you see in movies, when somebody says, “touché?” I’d surprised Fuller, by what I knew. Even hicks did homework. “It was in the files,” I added.

  “Well, it was awkward,” Fuller said. He went silent on me. I could see him sorting through things, what not to tell me, how to put things. “He was the best. We looked at three other candidates. Martha was anxious that we make a hire but there she parted company with the rest of us. We were willing not to hire Garner. I’ve told you why. But we couldn’t bring ourselves to e
ngage anyone else...that year.”

  “A busted search?”

  “Yes,” Fuller said. “I shouldn’t tell you this but I don’t see how it can matter now. Garner was the best candidate in a search that was canceled. People have sued for that kind of thing and won. And I happen to know that Hiram Wright advised him to sue. Did he tell you that?”

  “No.”

  “I’ll bet he didn’t.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Well...” He faltered a little, then plowed on. “I overheard. I stopped outside an office door that hadn’t quite closed and I listened to a telephone call. Hiram wanted to cause us pain. He was feeling it himself, I’m sure, after what happened to his golden boy.”

  “Did Garner sue?”

  “No. Just hearing Hiram’s end of the conversation, I could tell that Garner wasn’t taking the suggestion.”

  “What kept him from suing? Could you tell?”

  “Love of this place. Alma Mater. He couldn’t bring himself to do it, even at Wright’s urging. It makes it all sadder, doesn’t it?”

  G-Man, G-Man, G-Man, you’re my man, that’s what I’m thinking, driving south a few days later. Graves doesn’t buy it, I know that. Someone Martha Yeats pissed off fifteen years ago? Someone who hasn’t been seen or heard from since? So maybe I’m not just looking for a murder suspect. I’m on the trail of the American dream, what’s left of it, wherever it’s gone to, the poor kid who goes to college, wins a scholarship, waits tables, washes dishes, graduates at the top of his class...and vanishes.

  Highways 661, 62, 71 go south and into the past. South is easy, it comes natural, it feels like it’s downhill, all the way to Florida. I’m passing out of Mount Vernon, through a pair of white-clapboard villages, Brandon and Homer, people sitting on front porches, happy to watch traffic that slows down to forty-five. There’s loads of yard ornaments, which are called yardos around here: concrete geese dressed in aprons, bright painted cut-outs of bloomer-wearing women bending into flowers, dark silhouettes of pipe-smoking men, leaning against trees. Towns like this remind me of the lives that we’re supposed to live, that we fuck up. After I turn onto Route 62, closing in on Columbus, garden apartments press against the highway, golf courses surround tract homes, facing away from traffic, turning their backs to you, dropping trousers, showing their asses. Go ahead, Graves said, drive down south and poke around. But he made it sound like he was giving me the day off. Taking a joyride with my ex-wife, a pair of leaf-peepers on a late September morning, following autumn south.