by Daniel Smith
“I don’t have to tell you that life is unfair, especially in the university.”
“Yeah, well, surely you know not to put any stock in student evaluations, Pat.”
“I understand they’re only thinking about themselves and their precious grades, but they are our customers, you know.”
“So are we running a book store or a restaurant?”
“Ha, ha. You know that the administration sees everything differently now.”
“So they’re treating student evaluations like reviews on Trip Advisor? ‘Thought my journey into colonial America would be fun but there was just too much required and I got tired. Not enough excitement. Maybe the French Revolution would be a better bet.’”
“Make fun of it, Brian, but do so at your peril.”
“’Peril’?”
“You not only got ‘meets expectations’ in teaching but also in service and research.”
“So?”
“You know perfectly well that ’meets expectations’ is the dumping ground for new faculty just figuring things out and burned-out associate professors who’ve just given up. We need to see you with at least one ‘exceeds expectations.’”
“Whose expectations am I failing to exceed, Pat? Yours? Who hasn’t published a thing since tenure”—
“I go to the British Historical Association conference every year, Brian”—
“What—to suck down some Guinness and prattle on about how Eastern Missouri is slowing your roll?”
“I stay on top of the literature—something you might want to consider doing. Do you really believe you’re working that hard?”
I shrug, then, mutter something about the subjectivity of hard work. Then I suddenly flash back to myself as a young boy listening to my father lecture me on the absolute necessity of hard work. Hell, even if I’d finished mowing the lawn, pulling weeds in the garden, and washing cars, he’d invent some make-work assignments just to keep me and my brother busy all day. “Hard work makes a man strong—and I’m not just talking about muscles, boys,” he told us. And now to hear my “boss” question my work ethic, I can only be thankful that my poor ailing father can’t hear or think clearly enough; the mere possibility that he’d raised such a weak son would only deepen his depression.
“We just haven’t seen much out of you,” Pat continues. Not since your book on southern family life, which was, what, 13 years ago? And wasn’t that originally your dissertation?”
“Look, I’m just a little behind on the big project.”
“’The big project?’”
“Yeah. It’s an overview of early America. Very sweeping. Very radical. It’s going to make waves.”
“When’s it going to be finished?”
“Still doing the research.” I glance at my watch and realize how late it’s getting. “I’ve got to go to class.”
“You do that. But our little confab . . . Don’t forget about it. People are watching. You’re going to have to step up.”
“Or what?”
“I assume you want to keep your job.”
“I assume you know better than try to take it.”
“Like I said,” Pat said, with the most ominous look he could muster, “people are watching.”
I left his office with my heart racing, sweating all over. Great. The students will think I’m having a heart attack. What if I am? “People are watching.” I got into this business precisely because I couldn’t stand anybody watching me. I grab my lecture notes—which I never got around to looking at this morning—and head for my survey class. If I see Billy Watkins, I swear I’m going to punch him out.
Mercifully, class goes uneventfully—which is to say, my lecture on the Great Awakening was greeted by about the same number of highly motivated bright eyed students as it was sleepy ones who routinely tune me out. Mr. Watkins was there but he mostly checked his email—in defiance of class rules—while I tried to explain why the famous orator of the Great Awakening, George Whitefield, proved so spellbinding.
I drive home to our place in St. Louis’s South City, a brick two-story shrouded in trees desperately in need of trimming, hoping for some comfort. Corinne and I bought the rambling house a few months before we got married. We were especially attracted to the enclosed back porch where we could look out at our little postage stamp of a back yard that was surrounded by big 50-year-old trees, sip our drinks, and talk about the life we’d created, and what hopeful future might lie ahead. As I pull into the driveway, though, no such comfort wells up inside me. Rather, what come into focus are Pat’s worrisome words about my being watched. I take a couple of deep breaths, collect my book bag, and go inside the house.
Corinne sits with headphones on, her head bobbing while she chair dances to some 80s pop music I can’t relate to. And all the while, she’s immersed in taking notes and punching out something on her laptop. With a glass of wine already in hand, I interrupt her flow.
“You scared me, Brian!”
“Just entered my own house. Didn’t realize that was an active threat of some kind.”
“No, silly. Just didn’t expect you so soon.”
Corinne gives me a kiss and a quick smile; obviously, she has once again had a much better day than I have.
“What are you working on?” I ask.
“Working up some briefs on the Ferguson trial. Say how about sharing the vino with your true love?”
I pour her a glass of white wine, which is no doubt her third of fourth of the day. Somehow, amazingly, she seems unaffected by it, doesn’t gain weight, and thus far manages to maintain a well-functioning liver.
“Is that the sex triangle where the crazy bitch killed the other woman because she was going back to her husband?”
“Not exactly court room talk, Bri, but, yeah, that’s the charge.”
“And your client is the crazy—?”
“Crazy but not a killer.”
“I can’t decide if I envy you or pity you.”
“Let’s just say ‘envy’. That feels so much better, honey.”
“Well, it is a wonderful advantage that you get to focus your work on the here and now, defending people in real trouble, whose rights, and actual lives, I guess, you’re trying to protect.”
“That’s the idea.”
“But you’re not really pursuing any sort of truth, are you?”
“You mean like your wonderful historical truth, that nobody really believes in anymore?”
“No, I mean, your goal is to get your client off—whether she did it or not. My goal is to figure out who did what in the past and write it up the way it is, regardless of the consequences.”
“Since all your subjects are dead, honey, isn’t the consequence of your brave words about their long-ago lives, sort of meaningless?”
“Reputation and legacy, dear. That’s not meaningless.”
“It is if you’re six feet under.”
Corinne senses my frustration and fatigue in losing another verbal battle with her. “So you had a bad day?”
“Not really . . . well, if you don’t count my chairman warning me that if I don’t publish something soon, I may lose my job. Otherwise, yeah, it was all good.”
“’Lose your job?!’ Jesus, Brian, you can’t let that happen!”
“I don’t intend to. What’s for dinner?” I head for the kitchen, famished. Corinne follows me in. I see nothing to eat.
“I didn’t have time to do much.”
“I can’t see you did anything. Guess I thought since this was the day you worked from home, you might have prepared a little something.”
“We go to court in a couple of days, Brian. I have to be ready.”
I pull out a frozen pizza from the refrigerator and heat up the oven. As I throw on some additional cheese and pepperoni toppings, I can almost feel Corinne observing every move I make, looking for me to make a mess.
“I can see you watching me.”
When I turn around, I’m alone in the kitchen.
> Later that night, I crawl into bed, where once again, Corinne is deep at work on her laptop. I pull out my Kindle and prepare to read another 3-4 pages of the trashy novel that’s my new go-to sleep reading material. Corinne hardly acknowledges I’ve slipped into bed next to her. God, I hope the crazy bitch she’s defending truly appreciates the late nights and thousands of dollars being spent to save her skin. Never mind whether her skin is worth saving.
Finally, Corinne looks over at me. “Are you really in danger of losing your job? What happened to tenure, for Chrissakes?” she asks.
“The university is in bad shape, Corinne. You know that. Enrollments are down, the legislature hates higher ed, there’s too many faculty and not enough tuition money coming in. Do the math.”
“I hope the math doesn’t compute into ‘goodbye, Professor Fenton.’”
“What if it does?”
“Better publish your ass off, sweetheart.”
“Great. Now I’ve got you watching me too.”
2 | Brian
I’m taking a hike along the leafy Lewis and Clark trail that borders the Missouri River Bluffs. Yes, it’s beautiful, but I’m not here for the vistas. I should be here for the exercise—can’t seem to lose the 10 pounds or more I’ve put on since reaching what I call UMA (undeniable middle age), though I guess I could cut out the bottle of wine I go through every other day—but instead I’m here to refocus, or what Corinne would call a change of venue. Walking through the thickly wooded trails offers the polar opposite of my adult life spent in front of a computer or a classroom. I may still find myself thinking about my dad’s condition or my future in academe, but at least out in the woods there’s plenty to divert me from so many self-obsessions. I asked Corinne to join me but as usual she declined this sort of non-competitive form of exercise. She much prefers tennis where by the end there’s a winner (Corinne) and a loser (me). Growing up, I used to play almost every sport imaginable but two hip replacements and assorted bouts of arthritis later, I now exercise precisely the way as a boy I used to sadly observe “old fucks” in our small town get theirs: taking slow walks and playing a little golf.
As it happens, I have plenty of companions on the trail. Several moms and dads are taking a walk with their kids who are literally running circles around their slow-moving parents down the pathways. I remember thinking back in college I should maybe try to walk the entire Appalachian Trail, which is over 2,000 miles long. I routinely return home from this under two-mile trail hike feeling triumphant like some modern-day Meriwether Lewis. It is amazing how far our ancestors were willing to walk in difficult terrain not knowing where or when the scenery would break, let alone, the opportunity to find “civilization” would ever become clear. Before we take our first step on the ‘trail, we know it’s a 1.8 mile loop that returns us to the parking lot where our fancy, climate-controlled, GPS-directed SUVs await us.
I’m enjoying the pre-programmed trail hike in the early spring air—the leaves are coming out and there’s a nice warm southerly breeze—when my cell rings. Corinne frequently insists I leave my cell at home when going off on walks like this (“you aren’t really alone with nature, Brian, if you’re stopping every few minutes to check your fucking email,” she likes to remind me). So I don’t answer and keep trudging along, my right knee starting to feel a bit tight. (God forbid, if THAT joint is the next one I’ll be calling my orthopedic surgeon about soon.) But then my cell buzzes again and I decide to sit on a comfortable-looking stump and take the call. I can see it’s my son’s number.
“Danny? Well, how’s it going, son?”
“Great, Dad. Really good.”
“Wonderful. You enjoying life down in Little Rock?”
“It’s not really Little Rock, Dad. It’s this little town, Boaz.”
“OK. But it’s all good, right?”
“Sure.”
Then follows a brief silence which I’ve learned to fear when it comes to hearing from Danny. I remember a similar pregnant pause preceded a sorrowful tale about losing yet another job and an emergency request for $3000, or the silence that was followed by Danny’s announcement that his first wife, Ellen, decided she wanted to bring her old girlfriend who she’d started sleeping with into their home as some sort of permanent threesome, or—my favorite—the moment, right out of high school, Danny decided he was going to join a near stranger in Galveston selling fishing boats, only to discover the stranger, appropriately named Ponzi, had stolen the $500 Danny had brought to Texas (his entire savings) as well as all his credit cards.
“It’s just that there’s some issues, you know, that Dawn and I are sorting through,” he says.
“‘Issues’?” I have not met Dawn but everything I know so far spells trouble. It’s not just her trailer trash living situation. Danny apparently met her at a gun and knife show in Memphis. Not the most promising setting, one would think, for a romantic meet-up. At least Danny possesses a large, fairly valuable, knife collection—for what reason I cannot possibly divine—that he’s been cultivating since he was a pre-teen. Why Dawn was there is beyond me. But Danny fell for her quickly, probably “monkey-barring” it since he’d broken up with the bisexual Ellen, only a few weeks before. As best I can tell, Dawn waits tables at a sports bar in Little Rock while Danny tries to “reconnect.” To what, anymore, I have no idea. Back in Memphis he drove for Uber, but once he moved in with Dawn in the wilds of Arkansas, that wonderful career went a-glimmering.
“I really hate to bring this up, Dad”—
Oh, God, do I know what is coming now.
“But I may need some help.”
“You need money?”
“Well, yeah,” he says, “but that’s not the main thing.”
“OK.”
“Look, we’ve been fighting a lot and it’s gotten a little, I don’t know how to say it. Ugly, I guess.”
“What are you fighting about, Danny?”
“I don’t want to”—
The connection goes bad.
“You ‘don’t want to’ what?”
Crackle, then “It’s bad.”
“Well, you know, Danny, me and Corinne a long time ago signed off on trying to meddle in your personal business.”
No answer. More pregnant silence. “Danny, can you hear me? It sounds like you’re driving. Can you hear me ok?”
A crackling sound, then: “Yeah. It’s fine.”
“What do you want me to do, son? More silence. “Where are you?”
“About an hour from your place.”
“You’re on your way HERE?!”
Dead silence.
Not quite halfway through the trail loop at this point, I turn around and fairly sprint my way back to the parking lot, nearly knocking down a couple of elderly hikers who doubtless wondered how could anybody be running past all this beauty. All I can think of was, why this, why now? The very idea that Danny is going to show up at our house—essentially unannounced—after yet another personal emergency—especially for Corinne, this was going to be another test of her love for an adopted son who had always been a challenge to raise.
As I drive back home, I rehearse how I can possibly finesse any of this with her. I can’t even decide what’s the worst news: that Danny’s personal life has become so unhinged that he’s suddenly showing up at our house, that he’s broken up with Dawn (or is that a good thing?), or that he simply needs our financial support? As much as she loves Danny, Corinne will see all this as the predictable outcome of a boy raised with little discipline and no clear sense of who he really is. We never hid from Danny the truth about the identity of his biological parents. But they were, as best as we could tell, a drug-addled teenage couple from a Chicago suburb who’d been talked into giving up the baby instead of aborting it. The one moment of contact we had with Danny’s Baby Momma—the dad had already flown the coop—she seemed blissfully certain (now that some actual adults were coming to take care of the baby she seemed clueless to raise) that somehow the world would be wo
nderful to our new “Danny Boy,” as she called him. Alas, years later when Danny tried reaching out to her after graduation, she never returned his call.
I get back home and check my watch. It’s 5:15. Danny won’t likely drive up for another 10-15 minutes. The best news, or so it seems, is that Corinne’s not home from work yet. Thank God, I don’t have to explain anything to anyone just now. I rush inside and try to think: should I respond to Danny with shock, upset, disapproval or, as I know I will, acceptance and welcome? Don’t I have a right to be angry, even a bit defiant, about his sudden appearance at my house? I guess this just proves the wisdom of the great poet Robert Frost: “Home is where you go where they have to take you in.”
I sit drinking a glass of Merlot when I start to pick up a familiar acrid smell. Is there dope in the house? I get up and start to search for the smell, when I catch sight of a figure nearing the front door. I don’t have to peek through the window to realize that it’s Danny and I’m smelling marijuana.
There he stands, his guitar and backpack slung over his shoulders and reeking of dope. He’s a good-looking young man, with a face that is generous, kind and open. And that’s the problem: he never picked up an ounce of my cynicism and self-doubt but instead got overdosed on his real mom’s eternally sunny optimism that no matter how ill-planned and unquestioning your life decisions, it will all work out and probably to your advantage.
I get a big bear hug from Danny as he enters. He tosses his guitar and backpack on the sofa and looks around the place. “Crib looks great, Pops. Really cool.” Recently, Danny’s taken to calling me “Pops,” an affectionate name, I assume, but to me it screams “you’re an old man now, too old for ‘Dad.’” I’m tempted to bring this up but then it feels lame to protest the obvious: I am old enough to have a 30 year-old son.
Danny continues to walk around the place as if he’s thinking of buying it instead of the freeloading plan he’s doubtless about to announce. “OK, Danny. Sit down and tell me what this is all about.”
“Before the boss gets home, right?”
