"But you didn't," Merrion said, 'you didn't love having him do it."
"I didn't encourage it, no," she said. "But I didn't try to discourage it, either. I don't think I could've, if I'd tried, but I didn't really try. He had a great time, a wonderful time, pretending he was one of you. But then you all went home. The next day he was back here with me, hung-over but with me, the solid Walter I'd liked the minute that I met him, and grew to love, and married. Of course I was glad he'd had fun. But I hoped he'd never change.
"And so when he died, well, I had no idea of winding up with you. When I felt it starting to happen, felt myself getting attached to you, I hoped I was getting it wrong. But I wasn't. I did become attached to you. Wanting to or not. And so now I have to deal with it, that's all. We have to deal with it now."
"Yes," he said.
"Be patient with me, Amby," she said. "I do have a good heart, you know."
The young man she had met and started living with during her second year at the University of Wisconsin at Madison in the spring of 1963 had been a graduate assistant in the department of economics assigned to teach a basic survey course to freshmen, 'very bright and very intense, and very Marxist, too." She said his name was "Tommy."
In February of that year he learned that he had won a fellowship to study for a year at the London School of Economics, 'which sort of disappointed him, because he'd wanted Cambridge. But I thought it was wonderful, and I thought he was wonderful and we were wonderful, and when it was time for him to go I went right along with him. Maybe I was right who knows? Maybe the two of us actually were wonderful, just like I thought, and therefore when we lived in Saint John's Wood, flat broke, it wasn't really cold and dreary, like it began to seem half an hour or so after we got there. Maybe it was magical, whee, just like I pretended.
"Tommy couldn't pull it off, believing it was magic. I suppose it's just possible he was right, and I was silly. That fellowship was for one, not two, and my stuffy, settled Three-M parents my father was a scientist for Three-M back home in strait-laced old Minneapolis had cut off my allowance when I dropped out of school.
"They really took a very narrow view of things. They said they didn't recall seeing anything in the Wisconsin catalogue that described a year of shacking up in London as the third year of what they'd agreed to pay for me to get, a four-year, liberal arts education.
"They'd thought of that as their biggest present to me, the foundation of the rest of my life. After I graduated if I still really wanted to apply to Juilliard and see if I was a good enough oboeist to become a professional musician, I could do that. And if I didn't want to do that, or did but didn't get in, then I'd be able to teach music in high school somewhere, because I'd have that solid college education. I'd be able to make a living for myself like a responsible adult. But I'd only completed half of the bargain. Now I was living in sin and being free in London. So therefore no more money.
"I don't know or maybe I just don't remember what it was exactly that I was going to do after that, after Tommy's year in London. Live happily ever after, maybe. But it was okay, just the same. We had a year like every girl and boy should have, one of wretched, grinding poverty, but unlike a lot of traveling scholars, he actually did study, and he did get his master's degree. And then we came back to Amerika with a K instead of a C and were against the war and stuff, and Tommy taught at MIT and got his Ph.D. You had to give that boy credit. He looked like a dope-smokin' hippie; he talked like a refusenik draft-resister, and he really didn't have a single stinkin' capitalist-running-dog bone in his whole body. But he loved his economics and he worked his butt off, and whatever you thought about how he looked or how he talked, you had to admit he knew his stuff. The kid was good, clearly headed for stardom.
"So I dumped him, naturally," she said. "Couldn't have that now, could we, being married to a star? Absolutely not. I think I dumped him, anyway; it's possible he may've dumped me. Probably depends on who's telling the story. But that was all after a while, not right off.
First he got a job teaching at UMass." and something studious and academic began stirring around again, deep down inside my fevered brain."
She held her hands aloft as though to indicate she was having a vision.
"I perceive that I am getting on in years. By this time I am almost twenty-four, ancient, and I suppose I am beginning at long last to grow up. As the hot-shot young professor's, ah, demure young wife, I was able to get free tuition. Then I was able to talk the proper authorities first into accepting the credits I'd sort of left behind at Wisconsin, and also some I'd sort of picked up while I wasn't doing much of anything else besides sleeping with Tommy in England, kind of studying at the University of London. After that, talking very fast, into letting me switch my major to psychology."
"Wow," Merrion said, "I'm impressed. They always made me give them money."
She smiled. "You probably weren't demure," she said. "I was, I was very demure. And academics're suckers for that. As a teacher's wife I was entitled to the undergrad free tuition anyway, and when they let me transfer credits like that, they were being maybe more than just a little bit crafty. They wanted Tommy to stay at UMass. Didn't want him flying off to some other place, better-known for its economics. So I'm sure it was at the back of their minds to use me to tie him down a little more securely, get his wife involved with a UMass. program of her own.
"So they let me study psych for free, being as how by then I was more interested in that than I was in music. I got so I enjoyed it. I was having fun. So naturally since fun isn't supposed to last very long, it seemed to go fast. It was kind of surprising how fast; what with summer-school and all, and no horsing around, everything fell into place. In just over a year I had enough credits to graduate.
"I'd barely started the grad program for master's in psychiatric social work when Tommy's comet ignited in the heavens of economics and he got precisely what everyone'd been expecting him to get all along: an invitation to join the faculty at the University of Chicago. Muslims have always had Mecca; Tommy in those days had Chicago.
'"I don't think I want to come with you," I told him. "I think I found out where it was that I've always been going. It was here. I want to stay here. You go if you want. I think you should." "So do I," Tommy said, and he did.
"When he left, me and UMass. both, I think they felt a little guilty, too, somehow responsible. After all, they'd lured my young husband to Amherst and what'd he done but go off and leave me there all by myself.
Like it was partly their fault. I didn't discourage that. Whatever they wanted to think that helped me was perfectly all right with me.
I'd finally begun to come down to earth and realize I was never going to be the first-chair oboe in the Cleveland Orchestra and have a torrid affair with George Szell. He was getting a little old for me by then anyway, and since I didn't have a husband anymore I decided the first thing I'd better do was find a way to make a living. And that's why I stayed.
"You see what I mean?" Diane said. "I don't really belong here? This is just where I washed ashore? You and everybody else I've met and gotten to know well here all seem to have some kind of inner gyro that controls you, determines how you rotate. It may be a little out of kilter, so sometimes you spin off-center; quite a few of you're like that. But I've never seen you go completely out of whack. You may teeter and wobble around, but generally you regain control and keep on spinning. And it looks to me as though you can do this without having to think about what you're doing.