Читать книгу The Committee - Sterling Watson - Страница 10

FOUR

Stall entered Anderson Hall by the staircase in the alley, hoping to glide silently down the ancient, linseed-smelling oak floor to his small cell without meeting any of his colleagues. His hungover, haggard face would not be a good thing for them to see until later, after time and more coffee had done their healing work. He had just come through the fire door at the end of the hallway when Amos Harding emerged from his office, head down over a piece of paper. Christ, the old man must have driven all night to get back here from North Carolina. Harding looked better for his journey than Stall did for his night of gin. Stall took a sharp left turn into the first available open door, Sophie Green’s office.

Oddly, she stood now exactly as she had the last time he had seen her—on his way to investigate the noise that had broken from the throat of Jack Leaf before he hit a sidewalk.

The circumstance gave him a moment to look at her—the delicate back, the slender fingers touching the spines of books in a way that made Stall think: Loving. And there was more to look at—a small spot of perspiration in the black silk exactly between her shoulder blades, and a lock of curly black hair that had come loose from the comb on the right side of her head. She withdrew her left hand from the bookcase and sent it to the unruly lock, but the hair fought back. She looked a little lopsided and, to Stall, the effect was charming. He stepped back into the hallway, saw that Harding was gone, and decided to knock lightly on Professor Green’s door.

Sophie Green took a step toward Stall, which seemed to mean that he was invited to enter her office. She had been hired after the retirement of a very old medievalist named Inigo Frasier, and for some reason her arrival had not triggered the usual shuffle of office space. She had been given Frasier’s very fine office rather than the smallest one in the basement, which usually went to a new hire. This departure from tradition had puzzled faculty of greater seniority and angered some of them. Stall had not been privy to any discussions of the office, but he assumed that the decision was of a piece with the fact that Dr. Sophie Green was the first woman to be invited to join the graduate faculty. The powers that were—in this case Harding and probably President Connor—had wisely not wanted to subject their first woman to the usual mild hazing which included basement offices, early-morning and late-afternoon classes, bad classrooms, and the worst committee assignments.

In the awkward silence, he considered simply welcoming her to the faculty, but he had already done that.

On her first day in Gainesville, he had met her in the parking lot where she was struggling with boxes of books. He had called the department secretary, Helen Markham, from a ground-floor office and asked her to send a custodian to help with the books. Then Stall and Sophie Green had chatted a little awkwardly while they waited for a middle-aged Negro to arrive pushing a dolly. The building had no elevator, so when the books had been rolled inside, Stall and the black man carried them up two flights of stairs. Throughout this long and sinew-wrenching process, Sophie Green had protested that there was really no need for all this trouble. She could have done it herself.

She weighed, Stall guessed, ninety pounds soaking wet, and while she probably could have gotten the books up the stairs, he was pretty sure it would have taken her most of the day, with rest periods and trips to an orthopedic surgeon. A Southern woman would have thanked Stall, complimented his strength and virility, and promised to bake him a lemon chiffon cake as soon as she could get to the store for the ingredients. And that would have been that.

When it was all over, Sophie Green opened her purse, a strange little thing made of chain mail that looked like it came from the boudoir of Virginia Woolf. From it she produced a dollar bill for the Negro custodian. This embarrassed the man enormously, and the more emphatically he refused the money, the more adamantly she offered it. Finally, Stall intervened. He knew the custodian from years of saying hello and goodbye in hallways and empty classrooms. He said quietly, “It’s all right, Jimmy. We’re finished here.”

Flustered, Jimmy bowed from the waist to Sophie Green and beat a hasty retreat.

She looked at Stall with all the puzzlement that growing up in Manhattan and earning a PhD at Columbia University could produce. Stall shrugged and smiled in a way he hoped came across as both kindly and worldly. All he said was, “We pay him to do this kind of thing. He’d never take a tip for it.”

Sophie Green frowned. The lines that formed across her forehead were as charming as the hank of hair that her grandmother’s mother-of-pearl comb could not tame. “You mean I hurt his feelings?”

Christ, woman, didn’t you see how he squirmed? “No, I wouldn’t say that. He just has his way of doing things.” And you have yours.

She looked off into the distance at the place where Jimmy Bright had vanished. Stall regretted mildly calling a Negro man older than he was by his first name. But here intervened more of the local custom—Jimmy would not have wanted Professor Stall to call him Mr. Bright. Such a pretense at equality would have insulted Jimmy in a way so complicated that Stall did not even want to think about it.

So there Tom Stall and Sophie Green stood in their mutual confusion, and there Stall welcomed her to the English Department. “I hope you have a fine and productive time here with us.” He had almost said, in the sunny South. “I’ve read some of your work and I find it to be . . .” Embarrassingly better than my own? “. . . first rate. Really wonderful. And I’m sure you’re as good a teacher as you are a scholar.”

Sophie Green extended her tiny hand and Stall took it in his own big sweaty one. He wouldn’t apologize for the moisture: he had just carried her books up two flights of stairs. “Thank you,” she said. “I hope we can be friends.”

Later, Stall thought about her verb. Not will be, but can be. Was she saying that this transaction with Jimmy Bright and the books had opened up a cultural chasm they might not be able to bridge?

Now, standing in Sophie Green’s enviable office, hiding from Amos Harding and the rest of the English faculty, Stall said, “I guess you heard about what happened yesterday?” Immediately he regretted mentioning the thing that would cast a pall over the opening of the school year.

Sophie Green frowned (and there again was that wonderful furrowed brow) and seemed to think hard about the bad news. “Yes,” she said, “I heard. I didn’t know Professor Leaf.”

Maybe this was why Stall had mentioned the death. Maybe he wanted to talk about it with someone, and maybe a stranger was the right person. Someone who knew nothing about Jack Leaf. He found that he didn’t know what to say about Jack Leaf. Leaf seemed . . . was the phrase that kept coming to him, not Leaf was. Jack Leaf was the kind of man who forced you to interpret. Made you speculate. You kept thinking, Who is this guy? Stall had to say something.

“I didn’t know him well. He was kind of private, if you know what I mean. I liked him, though.”

Professor Green’s voice was low and shy when she said, “I heard about what you . . . did for him.”

She meant, of course, that Stall had sacrificed a sport coat to the privacy of a dead man. Historians had recorded that when Caesar was stabbed twenty-three times in the Senate by men he had considered friends, his last act before dying was to pull his toga over his face. “Yeah, I . . .” was all Stall could think to say.

“Well, it was good of you, Tom. A kind thing.”

It was the first time she had used his first name.

Stall thought about Jack Leaf. “Jack was what you might call dapper. He liked good clothes, and he wore them well. None of that professorial shabby gentility for Jack. He wasn’t a dandy or anything, but he didn’t go out in public looking casual.”

“What did that mean, do you think?” Sophie Green folded her arms across her bosom.

“I don’t know.” Stall looked out over her head at the dark gloom of the ancient water oaks, trees that had been here since the foundation of the building was laid in 1922. “I don’t know, but I always had the feeling he was back there behind the clothes, the manners, the easy bonhomie . . . you know, watching. Looking out at the world very carefully, very . . .” Stall couldn’t complete the thought, but he was certain now that the word mysterious suited Jack Leaf. Stall knew that war removed men from their contemporaries who had not fought. In important and sometimes unfortunate ways it set them apart, and perhaps that remove was part of what defined Jack Leaf, but that distance was not all of it. There was more to the mystery. Stall glanced at his watch. Christ, it was almost nine o’clock, and it was a five-minute walk to the administration building. “Whoops,” he said, “I’ve got to go. Got a meeting,” and he turned for the door.

She was behind him in the hallway. “This is for you,” she said.

Stall skidded to a stop and took the envelope from her hand. She smiled when he looked into her eyes, and then he was hurrying again.