Читать книгу No Ivory Tower - Stephen Davenport - Страница 14

SEVEN

The next morning, the first day of classes, Francis Plummer awoke to a big surprise: the air around him was not aglitter, shimmery with expectation the way it always had been on the first day of classes. It was simply air. He sat up straight and leaned back against the headboard.

He wanted to tell Peggy, but even if he didn’t feel shy in their bed after months of not being allowed in it, he wouldn’t. She might think he was having another crack-up. Or the second chapter of the same one. And anyway, she was still asleep, her arm across her eyes.

So he got up and went into their bathroom, took a shower, shaved, and brushed his teeth. When he came back naked into their bedroom and put on his new khaki trousers and new shirt and tie, laid out for him last night in readiness for this day, Peggy had turned over, facing the other way, still asleep. He went into the kitchen and made the coffee, where Levi, their dog, greeted him with less effusiveness than usual, it seemed: just one thump of his tail on the floor and a return to sleep.

Right after the electric percolator had its little orgasm and the coffee was ready, he heard the shower going. At last, Peggy was up. He went to the front door, opened it and bent to pick up her New York Times, and brought it back and placed it on the kitchen table for her. She practically memorized it every morning, and she ate breakfast too. He never did. He liked to start the morning’s classes caffeinated, empty, like a jock before a game, not satisfied. And he never read the Times until after lunch. To go to class stuffed with random irritations and bits of passing interest would be like trying to pray, or meditate, while someone was screaming in your ear.

He turned on the front stove burner, the medium one, as she had instructed him about four billion times, and heated the pan slowly as the manufacturer instructed—even though that was bullshit just to make the pan special, which it wasn’t—it was a frying pan, for crying out loud—and broke two eggs in it scrambling with a fork, the way she liked it. He sliced a bagel, plain, without poppy seeds, because after you’ve reached fifty you could get diverticulitis if little things like poppy seeds got stuck in your intestines.

She appeared just as he was sliding the eggs for her onto a plate next to the bagel, wearing a green terrycloth bathrobe he’d never seen on her before. It looked like a big towel with sleeves. Its unfamiliarity made him sad. Her hair, still wet and shiny from the shower, had thin strips of gray against the black. She’d pin it up before she went to her library. “Good morning,” she murmured.

Good morning. Like what you might say to the mail carrier? Or two strangers passing in an office doorway? “Good morning,” he answered, and she sat down at the table and ran her fingers through her hair. He put the plate down before her.

She looked down at it, unmoving. Then she looked up at him. “Like old times,” she said. It sounded more like a question than a statement. He poured her coffee. She began to eat. He sat down across the table and watched.

The sound of several showers going at once, of adolescent murmurs and soft footfalls on the other side of the wall telling him the girls were getting up, brought him the same neutral feeling that had surprised him awakening. He wondered if this would happen again tomorrow. He knew Peggy had heard the girls getting up too; she’d been listening for it just as unconsciously as he had. If she hadn’t heard the sounds, she would be up from the table by now, gone through the door into the dorm, still in her new green robe, making sure they all got up. Old times for sure.

He wanted even more now to tell her about how he’d felt when he woke up. But he didn’t know how such a sense of loss could be described when September’s air rushed at them through the open windows. It heralded autumn’s gold and hung on to summer all at once, distilling what he most loved about the world. He stood from the table, took Peggy’s finished plate to the sink, then came back to her, bending down to kiss her goodbye—until they’d meet again at noon in the dining room. He looked down her robe at her breasts, even more mysterious to him now than when he’d touched them as a teenager late at nights in lovers’ lanes in his father’s car. She offered him her cheek. Then he left her and went out the door and walked the paths toward his classroom on this very first day of school, when the world was all fresh and new, a tabula rasa, swept clean of fault. He still wondered where the glitter had gone.

All nineteen faces of his ninth grade class were turned to him as he came through the door of his classroom five minutes later. They had heard from their parents and other alumnae and from the current sophomores, juniors, and seniors about Francis Plummer, also known as Clark Kent—because he was so mild and unobtrusive when he wasn’t teaching—and how the very first class his freshmen experienced at Miss Oliver’s School for Girls was always on “The Death of a Hired Man,” by Robert Frost. Since time began. Every one of them had read it over the summer, some more than once.

None of the girls were surprised when Francis ambled toward the front of the room where he looked up and pretended to be shocked to find them sitting around the table. They’d been told over and over that’s how he always started the year. He smiled and introduced himself. A stack of Famous Little Green Books, otherwise known as the Modern Library Collection of Robert Frost, was on his desk. He opened the one on the top, read out loud the name of the freshman girl he’d inscribed in it, and then looked up to see who raised her hand, and then he crossed the room and handed it to her. He did this nineteen times while everyone waited. Who would get to be the narrator? And who would be Mary, the farm wife who wanted to welcome Silas, the hired hand, home to die, and who would be Warren, the unwilling husband?

It wasn’t until he actually started that he realized what was missing was the pain. That’s what he called it—the only name he could come up with. He’d never told anyone about it, not even Peggy. That feeling that the poetry he was about to reveal to the students—or the novel, or the short story or essay—was expanding in his chest, pushing against his ribs. It would kill him if he didn’t get it out. It was like being hungry as you sat down to dinner—and yet much more than that. He hid his surprise and panic and plodded on, doing all those clever things he always did, well aware no charge was coming off him, no electric passion to ignite his students’ hearts.

By the time the class was almost over, the girls were exchanging looks that asked, Why is this so famous? And when, at last, the bell rang, they waited for a few seconds because maybe it happens now. But it didn’t. They trooped out, avoiding his eyes.

WHILE THOSE MYSTIFIED ninth graders were leaving Francis’s classroom, Rachel took a call from Bob. “Something terrible has happened in Chicago,” he said, “and I have to be there this weekend instead of with you.” Rachel was so disappointed that it didn’t occur to her to ask him what the terrible thing that had happened was. Their scheduled weekends together, each taking a turn at the traveling, were sacred contracts.

To make up for their disappointment, he asked her if she could accompany him to Cleveland on the following weekend where he was making a presentation at the annual conference of something or other, but she reminded him that she was to be in Greenwich at an alumnae gathering the Friday night and in New York at another on the Saturday afternoon, and there were a million reasons why she had to get right back to school that evening. Her tone of voice made it clear that he shouldn’t need to be reminded. She heard a woman say something in the background, something she thought was urgent from the tone, and she knew it was his secretary. “Just a minute,” he said, and now she could visualize him putting his hand over the phone. There was a moment of silence before he said, “I really have to go.”

“Then go!” she said and hung up on him.

AT LUNCH, ON that first day of classes, Gregory van Buren reminded the girls at his table that one does not start to eat until the host picks up a fork. “Or,” he added, precise as ever, “in the case of soup, a spoon. Today, and this evening at dinner, I will be the host.” His smile was almost beatific and his voice was gentle, but there was steel behind them. “Starting tomorrow at lunch, and for the next several days, our newest arrival will be the host,” he said, nodding his head toward a freshman girl across the round table from him. She looked surprised and scared, and pleased. “Thank you, Molly,” he said. “The duties are few. Simply decide when we are all settled comfortably and pick up a utensil. And if our conversation ever lags, or appears to exclude anyone, you might help me rejuvenate it.” He paused for an instant and then began again. “Now, we will all introduce ourselves and say a few sentences about our lives, starting with Molly, and then you will pass up your plates to my good friend Carmella,” nodding to the senior girl on his right, “and she and I will fill them, and pass them back, and then I will pick up my fork and we will commence to eat.” Carmella giggled, but she looked pleased too. Several other girls smiled behind their hands.

Gregory acknowledged their smiles with one of his own. “Do you know why I insist on this procedure?” he asked. “Because you are ladies and I am a gentleman and we care for each other. Therefore, we do not eat in animalistic bedlam as they do in lesser schools. This is a dining room, not a cafeteria.”

Gregory was quite pleased with the way they reacted. It was clear to him they enjoyed telling a little bit more about themselves than their names, and he noted that the older girls, who knew each other, chose things to tell he was sure they hadn’t told before. Almost everything they said, no matter how mundane, struck him as interesting and caused in him a surge of affection. It always did and it was always a surprise.

He spoke last, of course, being a gentleman. He told them he grew up in England. “No, I didn’t go to Oxford. It was what they call a red brick university,” he explained. And that he’d spent a summer vacation in New York City in the Seventies, taking an American history course in the daytime at NYU and going to the theater at night—and never went back to England. That part about going to the theater at night in New York City was the new part for the kids who already knew the rest. He didn’t tell them why he stayed in America: that he’d fallen in love with an American woman and they got married. Nor did he tell them that they divorced.

He was quite pleased with his performance in his classes this morning—with one regret. “Oh, Loreli! Why are you telling me how you feel? The question is how does Antigone feel?” She was terribly hurt. Next time he’d be more careful with the tone of his voice. And this evening during study hours, he’d seek her out and explain objectivity, how first we must discern, precisely, what is actually in the text. Once we assimilate that, then we can discern how we feel as a result. One of these days, he would design a course in which it was against the rules to use the first-person pronoun in class or in papers.

Now that the school year had actually started, he felt even more optimistic about the school’s prospects under its new young dynamic leader. Rachel Bickham was exactly the right person for exactly this moment. Nevertheless, he was feeling an itch. He despised tired metaphors, but that was the only way he could describe a new and persistent desire for more weight to carry. He wanted levers to pull to make things happen beyond the harangues he delivered in faculty meetings. Last year, Fred Kindler had helped him to understand that he’d been infantilized—such an ugly word—by Marjorie Boyd, who had made all the decisions. Fred had insisted that Gregory make the decisions in his own sphere, including the campus newspaper. If Gregory thought a story on the sexual activity of Miss Oliver’s girls inappropriate, then inappropriate it was. Gregory was grateful for this. But beyond his teaching, and his co-parenting with a female teacher of a dormitory, his sphere included only advising the school newspaper and the literary magazine. It was hardly a sphere. More like a dot. He wanted to lead, but the leadership area for which he was most qualified would go to Francis Plummer for obvious political reasons—the dean of academics. So Gregory thought to satisfy his itch, he might have to find another school where there was room for him to grow. Just to think such a thought made him sad. He loved Miss Oliver’s School for Girls and he wanted to work for Rachel Bickham.