Читать книгу The Committee - Sterling Watson - Страница 8

TWO

Still in his shirtsleeves and feeling the return of the adrenal energy that had poured through him during that long half hour at Murphree Hall, Stall leaned on the kitchen counter and watched his wife slice tomatoes for their salad. The good smell of roast beef came from the oven. Their first martinis stood crystalline on either side of the sink, Stall’s half finished, his wife’s untouched. She had stopped crying, but Stall could see the pathways of her tears in the light dusting of powder she had applied for his homecoming. The two things, the makeup she had put on for him and her tears, moved Stall so much that his own eyes burned. He took a long pull of cold gin and turned away to square himself. He had banished their daughter Corey from the kitchen at the first sight of Maureen’s tears and without any proper explanation for her exile, and he knew he’d have to make that right with her soon. Maureen put down her knife and rinsed red tomato juice from her hands.

“Jack Leaf. I just can’t . . . How do you understand a thing like this?” She looked at Stall out of swollen red eyes as though she meant the question, as though she thought he could tell her how.

He shook his head thoughtfully and took another sip of the good cold gin. Gin, he thought, how I love it. It’s one way to deal with the surprising hell of life. He had not told Maureen that, after he had tried the coffee in the CI and found it to be not enough, not by a long way, he had gone next door to the Gold Coast, a student dive, for two stiff shots of bourbon before taking the city bus home. She’d had the martinis waiting when he walked in the door and he’d taken a long sip of gin to cover the bourbon before giving Maureen her first kiss. Then he’d told her about Jack Leaf’s walk in the air.

Maureen drew in a hiss of breath. “Oh my God, did you . . . did anyone call Sarah?”

Oh Christ, Sarah. Jack’s wife Sarah.

Bourbon-stunned, Stall had ridden the bus home to their prairie-

style house on a hill just up from the construction site for the new law school. They’d bought this house so that he could walk and bus to work and Maureen could keep their Packard at home. She’d told him she’d be a housewife for him, but not housebound like her mother had been. She wouldn’t be without a car for anyone. As the bus had labored up the hill past the vast sprawl of married-student housing, Stall had thought through what he had done for Jack Leaf and for the university. When he’d finished the sad inventory of his actions, he’d said to himself, I did my duty. Now, standing beside Maureen in their kitchen waiting for a second martini, he had to tell his wife that it hadn’t occurred to him to call Sarah Leaf, or even to wonder who would call her. The awful thought hit him that right now Sarah could be standing at her own kitchen sink paring carrots and waiting for Jack to come home.

“God, Mar baby, I didn’t think of that, what with all I had to . . .”

Maureen turned and looked at him sharply, and the fear came alight in Stall’s brain that she might cry again. A woman’s tears had always turned Tom Stall into a standing heap of mush.

His wife’s eyes softened but not into tears. She gave him her frailty-thy-name-is-man look, which, considering her options, was at least in the upper third of good outcomes. He gave her his I’m-very-sorry smile, his only option. “Do you think I should call her now?”

It was a day of things occurring to Stall and one came to him now: he, they, Tom Stall and wife, would have to visit Sarah Leaf, and soon. They’d have to go to Sarah’s door with food of some kind, probably Maureen’s chicken-and–mushroom soup casserole, and they’d have to say and do the right things. Stall dreaded it, not because he found no meaning in such things, and not because he took the fashionable literary view of bourgeois convention (which right now meant a French existentialist view, the harshest of any available), but because he was no damned good at such things. He was just flat bad at offering human comfort to his fellow man. It was an odd thing, irony, because Stall believed that he loved his fellow man, loved Him with a capital H in the way that Whitman had loved the crowds in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.”

We fathom you not—we love you—there is per-

fection in you also,

You furnish your parts toward eternity,

Great or small, you furnish your parts toward the

Soul.

Stall loved people in the aggregate for their wonderful, messy, preposterous, goofy optimism. Loving his fellow man in his individual, farting, nose-picking, often criminally stupid state was hard, but Stall tried. In the war he’d seen the worst of human doings (blessedly, for a very short time), but he’d come away from that experience with a stronger sense of human goodness. He’d seen incredible valor too. Should he ever realize his dream of returning to Paris with enough money to show Maureen around in style, he knew that Jean-Paul Sartre and his sometime friend Albert Camus would not allow him even to walk past their café, Les Deux Magots, much less have a drink with them. Loving the world was not their cup of absinthe.

After thinking it over through a sip of martini, Maureen said, “No, don’t call her now. I think it’s better for you to wait until we know more.” She looked out through the kitchen window at their backyard where a pair of cardinals, bright red cock and dull hen, splashed in the birdbath. To the window she said, “I’m sure someone has told her about Jack. Someone from the hospital or the police. We’ll call together tomorrow.”

By the tone of her voice and the way she surveyed the backyard, beautiful in the falling summer light, Stall knew that she was composing the image in her mind of exactly how to comfort Sarah Leaf. The right way to do it.

* * *

After dinner and after Stall and his wife had told their daughter that something bad had happened at the university and this bad thing, the death of a friend, had made her mother cry, their daughter Corey, a hearty, athletic girl of twelve who had not known Jack Leaf except as a man to say hello to as he came and went at the few departmental gatherings the Stalls had hosted, seemed to take the death of Jack Leaf more as an idea (people die), than as anything personal.

Stall had taken pains to tell her that there was a very good chance that Jack Leaf had accidentally fallen from a window. Corey had asked a few questions, and these matched the logic of accidents, not suicide: Was Mr. Leaf teaching when he fell? Did the students see him fall? Did anyone try to catch him? When Stall could see that she was more or less satisfied with her parents’ explanations, he sent her to her room to finish her homework. Her mother said, “Corey, you’ll hear about this in school tomorrow. It’s better not to say that Daddy had anything to do with it.”

“But Mom, isn’t that lying?”

“No, lying is saying something that’s untrue. Saying nothing is not lying. It’s discretion.”

Both Stalls knew that their daughter would beat a path to her dictionary, so Stall said to her retreating, pajamaed form, “That’s d-i-s, not d-e-s.”

After washing and drying the dishes, Stall and his wife sat at the kitchen table, the place of their most serious discussions, with third martinis in front of them and commenced what Stall hoped would be a kind of elegy for Jack Leaf. The best thing they could do tonight, a thing in keeping with what Stall thought of as his love of the world, was to remember Jack Leaf well. Tell stories. Bring him back to life in words.

“Why did he do it?” Maureen sipped and gave Stall a look he saw only rarely. She was what the frat boys called a cheap date; the reference was to capacity for liquor not morals, though the two sometimes became confused. From experience, Stall knew that she was very close to the line that separated earnestly inebriated from stupidly drunk. He had only seen her on the far side of the line a few times, and over there she was not pretty. In that country she was abrupt, far too truthful, sometimes angry, and often inclined to think she had discovered things about her husband that her sober mind would have left alone. Stall had poured the third martini hoping it would be elegiac, lubrication for a Whitmanesque celebration of Jack Leaf. He had led Maureen here to the borderland, or at least he had not stopped her from approaching it. He said, “We’d better take it easy,” and reached out to place a hand across her glass.

She slid the glass out of reach. “I asked you why he did it.”

Stall shrugged. In the last hour, fatigue had hit him. It was nine o’clock and felt like midnight. He’d had five drinks and was reconnoitering number six. “I don’t know,” he said. It was the truth, but not all of it.

Maureen gave him the sharp look again, and when her head turned toward him, her glass lurched, spilling some of the crystalline fluid. “Was it the war?”

Jack Leaf, like many men who had fought, had not talked much about the war. He answered questions when asked, but questions were rare and his answers were brief. The English faculty were his social group, and they were, like Stall, mostly born to the role of spectator. Jack Leaf could have said a lot about the war, most people knew that, but he chose not to talk, and people respected his silence.

Stall had gone to the war, had served honorably if briefly, had been wounded, had nearly died of an infection probably resulting from having contaminated the shrapnel wound at the back of his thigh with shit that had exploded from his bowels with the concussion that came milliseconds after the explosion of a German shell. He had returned to consciousness lying in the snow between two dead men. He could not call them buddies, friends, anything like that. In the darkness, confusion, fear, and frenzy they had been shapes, faces safer for him than those of the men shooting at him, but nothing more than that.

When Stall awoke, the battle had moved on. In the distance, rifles rattled and cannons flashed. It was unbearably cold and he had no idea where he was. He assumed that he had been left for dead, covered as he was with blood from the men on either side of him. He waited until morning, shivering in the pathetically light wool greatcoat the army had considered adequate for Europe in the winter of 1945. The bleeding at the back of his thigh had stopped, and when dawn came he found that he could walk well enough leaning on the rifle he had found, and that walking did not cause the bleeding to start again. He never found his platoon (most of the forty had been killed), and never found his company, but he found the army and attached himself to it. He did not report the wound which he considered insignificant. For another week he walked, crouched, starved, shivered, and tried to hack holes in frozen ground until his thigh swelled to the size of his waist and he was sent to the rear with a raging fever, incipient gangrene, and the probability of amputation.

His leg was saved by the first-ever application in wartime of a new drug known as penicillin. His recovery took months, and when he was strong enough to enjoy a weekend pass, he went to Paris. Like Jack Leaf, Tom Stall never talked much about his war. He was proud to have served in what he considered a great cause, but he had seen too much of the chaos that arose from the best intentions to care much for causes again. One cause in a lifetime was enough. Now life, to Stall, was an everyday thing. Goodness was in a wife’s kiss and the feel of her breast as you left a warm bed in the morning, a child’s smile at the breakfast table. It was in a good cup of coffee at a drugstore counter, it was in talking to friends, and in more complicated ways it was in good books, and that was all there was to it.

If Stall had a regret, it was that his wound was not in the front of his body. He had been lying facedown in the snow when the shell exploded, a German 88 with a proximity fuse. A shell designed to burst above the heads of troops, to kill men crouching in holes in the ground. White-hot fragments rained down and killed what they could find, and it was only a tiny piece of steel that found Stall. He still wore it behind his femur. It hid there telling him nothing, not even when the weather would change. His only regret about his war was literary, or perhaps more accurately, historical. He loved the quotation attributed to Alexander the Great when, after years of conquest, his army mutinied before a battle in India. The men were worn out and demanded to go home. The young king called them to assembly, stepped forth, and stripped naked. “Does any man among you honestly feel that he has suffered more for me than I have suffered for him? Come now—if you are wounded, strip and show your wounds, and I will show mine. There is no part of my body but my back which has not a scar; not a weapon a man may grasp or fling the mark of which I do not carry upon me. Show this man to me and I will yield to your weariness and go home.” No one came forward. Instead, the army burst into wild cheering. In tears, the men begged Alexander to forgive their lack of spirit and pleaded with him only to lead them forward.

Stall’s wound was in the back of his leg. His war had been brief, and all he knew of life so far, it had taught him. Keep your head down when you can. Be good to others, ask for the same in return, drink the wines of the countryside and eat the good food, and don’t overcomplicate simple things. Occasionally people asked Stall about his war, and when they did, he gently tried to change the subject, and if they pressed him, and if he’d had a little bit to drink, sometimes he said, “I was only there for a few months. I was shot in the ass, but I was not running away.”

Stall drank some of his unusual third martini and said, “Jack fought all the way from Normandy to the Rhine with the 101st Airborne. He was wounded three times, and he won a medal. One of the big ones. He had a good war, or a bad one, depending on how you look at it.” Stall set down the drink and examined it, begging it for the truth he knew it held. In vino veritas. Was survival itself enough to justify three wounds and a year of brutal fighting? He’d never asked Jack Leaf that question.

“How did he look at it?” Maureen waited. She was very close to the line Stall did not want her to cross.

“He didn’t say. At least not to me. I saw his medals mounted in a glass case in his study. I just stuck my head in there one night at a party. You know, curious to see a colleague’s lair. His was close to perfect—like an English gentleman’s study. Leather chairs, a big rosewood desk, rows of books, a mahogany humidor, and a rack of pipes. Everything neat as a pin. Jack was all about order in life and work.” Until the end, Stall thought.

“Where was he wounded?”

Stall wanted to say, All over Europe, but knew that would be the gin talking. He said, “I don’t know. I never saw him in anything but his professor outfit.”

“You never saw him naked?”

Maureen knew, of course, that Stall had showered with many of his colleagues. Handball was the English professor’s game of choice. Played well, it was serious exercise. Several of the younger men played the game at noon, showered, and returned to their offices for sandwiches at their desks. So, yes, Stall had seen a lot of professorial nakedness, some of it ugly, some of it beautiful, none of it Jack Leaf. Stall shook his head.

“Where was he from?”

“Oklahoma, I think. His PhD is from Vanderbilt. I don’t know where he got his BA.” Of course, Maureen knew about Jack Leaf’s Vanderbilt connection. Of such things were pecking orders made, and the English Department hierarchy mattered to Maureen as it did to all of the wives. Possibly even more than it mattered to Stall.

She sipped and set down her glass with great concentration. “Did you know his middle name was Red?”

“Red? You mean a nickname?”

“No. I mean his full name was Jack Red Leaf.”

“You’re kidding.”

Maureen shook her head in a way meant to be decisive. Some of her gin slipped over the rim of her glass.

“Where’d you get that?” Stall slid his chair closer to his wife’s at the kitchen table. His knee touched hers.

“From Sarah. She told me.”

“When? Why? She just told you, Oh, by the way, my husband’s middle name is Red?”

“Of course not. Don’t be an ass.”

There it was. The anger that lived in the heart of Maureen from Across the Border. Where did it come from? Stall wondered. The gin only let it out, called it from its hiding place. What was the source of the anger in Maureen Stall?

From the land beyond earnestly inebriated, Maureen looked at him and then at her martini as though she were having a hard time deciding which she liked best. Or least.

“Sarah told me one night at a party—maybe it was the same party where you snuck into Jack’s study and pronounced it neat as a pin. Anyway, we were talking about marriage, you know, couples and how they meet, what attracts them, makes them want to be together.”

Obscurely, Stall saw that he might not like where this was going. With women, it was tit for tat, and just as surely as Jack Leaf’s wife had told Maureen about her and Jack, so had Maureen given Sarah Leaf her tit. No, Stall didn’t mean that. It was the gin talking and not well, but the idea was clear. Stall feared what Maureen might have told Sarah about the attraction between the Stalls. Not because he knew what she might have revealed, but because he had no idea.

Maureen said, “She said it was his skin.”

“His skin?”

“Yes, his skin. Come on, Tom. Think about it. The skin of Jack Red Leaf?”

It came to Stall. “No!”

“Yes, what else could it be?”

“You’re saying he was an Indian? You’re saying Sarah told you that?”

“Not in so many words. Her exact words were, From the first time I saw him, I loved his skin. His dark skin. It was so smooth. The man had no wrinkles. It covered him like caramel poured over a cake. You know what I mean, Maureen, and here she stopped and she sort of winked at me. We were both drinking, of course, and it was late at night in their house and most people were already gone, and you were off snooping in Jack’s study, and she winked and said, You know, Maureen, my husband’s full name is Jack Red Leaf.”

“And you knew . . .”

“Not until later. Not until I thought about it. And I started to wonder why she told me and what that wink meant. It was sort of a dirty wink, if you know what I mean.”

Stall thought about it. She could only mean one thing. “You mean, uh, sexy dirty. That kind of dirty.”

“Yeah, that kind. I think I know Sarah well enough to know when she goes sexy dirty late at night in her cups.”

“What was she drinking? We, uh, ought to get—”

“Oh, don’t be an ass. She was drinking firewater. I don’t know, probably bourbon. She likes bourbon. The question is, why did she want me to know what, apparently, nobody else knows or has even cared to think about? Why Jack Leaf’s skin was so dark.”

“I don’t know . . .” Stall ignored the fact that his wife had called him an ass twice, and considered the question. “I just thought—I mean if I thought about it—I thought his skin was Mediterranean. Maybe Leaf was the Americanized form of Leafiano or something. You know, a lot of people—”

“Oh God!” Maureen’s tone was infinitely weary, but Stall thought she was beginning to see the humor in this. The awful, absurd, but inescapable humor. Jack Leaf had been an underground man. And for some reason, his wife had sprinkled hints about his secret under the nose of the wife of the assistant department chairman. Jack Leaf was a Red Indian, and he was passing. Passing was serious business in the South, and Gainesville, Florida, was definitely the South.

The important thing, the sobering thing (and God knew they needed sobering), was that nobody in an English department in a Southern land-grant university had ever even considered the possibility that a member of the graduate faculty might be an Indian. A Red man named Red Leaf. It would have been like asking yourself if a man with a very dark tan that never faded in winter was a Negro. To the bigoted minds that worked the farms and picked the oranges and pumped the gas out where the kudzu crept daily toward University City, there was not one inch of difference between a Negro and an Indian. Even English professors knew this. To the bigoted mind, Negroes and Indians were one and the same, and they were bad.

Stall had grown up Southern and had rid himself to the best of his ability of the racial and social ideas of his parents and grandparents. He considered himself liberal in both the old and the new senses of the word. Maureen had not grown up Southern. She was from Oberlin, Ohio, a college town, and she counted professors among the men of her family going back generations. Stall had met Maureen Wiggins when he was a grad student at the University of Virginia just after the war, and in the process of choosing each other, they’d had many political discussions. It was Maureen who had vetted Stall. Stall believed that she had chosen the famously conservative Randolph-Macon College (“Randy Mac” to the boys of UVA) as the place to earn her BA in education at least partly so that she could spend four years there as a member of the opposition to all things Southern and especially the doctrine of separate-but-equal. She had made it clear to Stall that their relationship could go no further than casual dating (though they were strongly attracted to each other) unless he made sincere declarations to her of his liberal values. Like most young men his age, and especially young men who had been to war, Stall would have done almost anything to get a coed into bed, but with Maureen, sincerity came at no price. He really did hate everything that was small-minded and bigoted about the South. He had broken forever with some of his relatives over segregation, and in those days, in the certainty of youth, he knew that he would never regret these partings of ways.

The phone rang. It was too late at night for polite phone calling, so Stall knew this ringing could be about only one thing, the death of Jack Leaf. He stood a little unsteadily and said, “I’d better get that.”

Maureen stared at the jangling instrument that hung from the kitchen wall as though it might leap across the room and bite her.

Stall said hello to the world outside this kitchen in his most confident voice.

“Hello, Tom. Amos here. I’m sorry to call you so late at night and with such a sad thing to discuss.” The long-distance line was windy, and Harding sounded as far away as he was.

Amos Harding, chairman of the English Department. Ancient Amos, whose life’s work—studies of the essays of Sir Thomas Browne—was considered by most of the younger graduate faculty so hopelessly out of date that it disqualified Harding as chairman. But Harding hung on, mostly by dint of Southern courtliness and a golfing friendship with Thomas Connor, president of the university. Stall walked a narrow line between Harding, whom honor required him to defend, and the younger faculty, who thought Harding kept the department firmly anchored in the nineteenth century.

“Hello, Chairman Harding.”

“Call me Amos, Tom, especially on a night like this. I’m calling to thank you for stepping into the breach when we needed you today.”

The boy stood on the burning deck, Stall thought, then shook his head. All he had done was give a dead man the decency of a covered face and ask some students the obvious questions.

“Well, thank you, sir . . . Amos. I only did what anyone would have done.”

“Not just anyone, Tom. We both know a situation like that requires grit and judgment. McPhail told me you did well.”

McPhail? A dancing policeman. The standard for decisive action. Before Stall could thank the chairman again, Harding said, “President Connor wants to see you. Tomorrow. Among other things, he wants to thank you for acting as you did.”

Stall’s tired brain selected among other things from the flow of language as a bear would snatch a leaping salmon in its jaws. Sweat broke out on his forehead. Maureen sipped unsteadily and looked at him with concern.

“He’ll see you at nine o’clock. And Tom, come by my office after you finish with the president.”

“Yes sir, of course.”

“Amos, Tom. Call me Amos. You’ve earned it. You may well be my successor, so the two of us ought to know each other better before I shuffle off this mortal coil.”

“Surely, sir, only the coil of the job. Not the, uh . . . I’m sorry, I meant to say Amos.”

A dry chuckle came over the line. “That’s all right, Tom. We’re all a bit rattled today.”

“Amos,” Stall said, “have you spoken to Sarah Leaf?”

Harding sighed. “Yes, Tom. I spoke to her earlier this evening. She’s in a pretty bad way. I sent my wife over to stay with her until other arrangements can be made.”

Stall thought about the appalling awkwardness of Harding’s elderly wife appearing at Sarah Leaf’s door announced but unwanted. Poor Sarah. And then Stall reconsidered, thinking himself the ass his wife had called him twice tonight. Who was he to say what comfort Sarah Leaf might take from the doddering Mrs. Harding? And Stall knew he was getting a glimpse tonight of the greater reach of a chairman’s job, the future that lay ahead of him should Harding choose him as his successor. The job, if Stall got it, would involve more than hiring and promoting, deciding which grad students got stipends and teaching assistantships, chairing meetings, and generally herding a flock of exotic birds. It would mean phone calls like this one late at night, and missions of condolence like that of old Mrs. Harding.

Stall assured Amos Harding that he’d be sitting in President Connor’s outer office at fifteen minutes to nine the next morning. Harding thanked him and they said good night.

Stall finished his drink and lifted Maureen by the elbow. She took a final defiant sip of gin, then set the half-finished third martini on the kitchen counter. As they walked to the stairs, she said, “Maybe we should have called Sarah.”

“Harding called her. He sent his wife over to stay with her.”

“Oh no.”

“I know.”

And with that the Stalls went up to bed.