“Uh-huh,” he said, yawning.
“Good night, Sid. Thank you for a merry Thanksgiving.”
“Martha, if you want me to sit with them—”
“You have work to do.”
“I can work at your place, honey.”
Cynthia looked at Markie: honey. Martha put her cheek to Sid’s and, for a second, kept it there.
“Martha—” he began. However, she chose to misunderstand him; no, no, they could stay alone; it was good for them, it developed character; it destroyed silly fears. But Cynthia, don’t forget, you don’t open the door for anybody. Then, feeling no compulsion to say any more, she left the three of them — it was dusk — and went into the Hawaiian House to feed a bunch of strangers their Thanksgiving dinner.
3
I suppose I have certain advantages over my colleagues (and 99 percent of the world’s population) in not needing my job. I am alone in the world, and self-sufficient — economically, that is — while they, on pay checks that are slipped bimonthly into their boxes at Faculty Exchange, must buy provisions for wives, children, and in a few instances, psychoanalysts. Worse, they have aspirations, visions of tenure and professorships, and all of this combines to make them jittery on other scores as well. I teach out of neither spiritual nor financial urgency. Perhaps I could receive my share of satisfaction from some other job, but at present I prefer not to. I have never had any pressing interest in buying or selling, and I possess neither the demonic genius nor the duodenum necessary for mass persuasion. There are occupations outside the University that have interested me, but they are, to be frank, tasks that play footsy with the arts; whenever I think of them, I think of all those girls I used to know in Cambridge who, the day after graduation from Radcliffe, zoomed down to New York to be copyreaders in the text-book departments of vast publishing houses, or script girls for Elia Kazan, or secretaries at twenty a week for perennially collapsing, perenially sprouting, little magazines. Perhaps the other sex can afford such lapses into fetishism, but the rest of us are wise to take our places as men in the world as early as we can possibly make arrangements to.
So, for myself, I taught classes as diligently as I could, straining daily at being Socratic and serious; I marked all those weekly compositions with the wrath of the Old Testament God and the mercy of the New; I emerged bored but uncomplaining from endless, fruitless staff meetings; and every six months or so, I plunged into my grimy dissertation and mined from it another Jamesian nugget to be exhibited, for the sake of the bosses and their system, in some scholarly journal. But in the end I knew it was not from my students or my colleagues or my publications, but from my private life, my secret life, that I would extract whatever joy — or whatever misery — was going to be mine.
I reached Chicago so late on Sunday night, feeling so broken and foggy, that it was not until I awakened the following day that I realized that the taxi I had taken from the airport had skidded me home to my apartment through a snowstorm. My limbs and mind had been fatigued from both my journey and my visit, and that distant corner where consciousness still burned was fed with recollections of the weekend — of my father, his fiancée, the Horvitzes, the old Herzes, Martha Reganhart, and of myself, what I had and had not done. When I am about to die the last sound you hear will be that of conscience cracking its whip. I am not claiming that this makes me a better man or a worse man; it is merely what happens with me.
At seven-thirty the next morning, the alarm sang out one stiff brassy note. Beyond my frosted window, it was a lithographer’s dream of winter; such Decembers they have in the Holland of children’s books. The snow covered the ground, and the sun the snow. With a happiness so intense that I saw no reason to question it, I rose from my blankets. Just living, sheer delightful breathing, had, in earlier periods of my life, convinced me that a man, like a dog, is most himself wagging his tail. This truth now asserted itself again, and it was with genuine pleasure that I shaved my face, selected my clothes, and prepared my breakfast. Four inches of snow, and life had changed back to what it once had been, what it should be forever.
I walked to the University through the crackling weather and the virgin snows, and arrived at Cobb Hall feeling as righteous, as American, as inner-directed as a young Abe Lincoln. Ears tingling, I taught two consecutive classes with such passion and good spirits that one of my students — a kittenish girl who never read the assignments but had a strong desire to please — carried her pouty lips down the corridor after me and, before my office door, allowed them to part. “Mr. Wallach, I think that was the most important hour of my life. It opened up whole new worlds.” We did not touch, but I went into my office thinking we had. My spirits remained untrammeled. I decided that before I began to mark papers I would call Martha Reganhart and verify our dinner date. By mistake I dialed the Herzes’ number. Paul answered; following a moment of dumb silence, I hung up.
The moraclass="underline" Don’t be fooled by the weather. Beneath the lovely exteriors, life beats on.
Later, because it was four o’clock and because it was Monday, there was the usual meeting of the staff; so life is ordered in academe. I arrived early, chose a seat near the window, and made myself comfortable at the round meeting table. I had with me mimeographed copies of four student essays which had been handed out to us the Monday before; they were to have been graded and mulled over preparatory to today’s meeting. A quarterly examination was coming up, and the object of evaluating these essays was to make sure that we were all in agreement about standards of judgment. We lived forever on the edge of a deep abyss: there was a chance that one of us might give an A to an essay to which another of us had given a B. And, intoned our more pious members, it was the student who paid the penalty. But it was we who paid the penalty, these grading sessions being nothing less than the student’s last revenge on his teacher. If the phenomenon we all engaged in that afternoon were ever to be staged in the theater, I would suggest that a chorus of freshman be placed behind a gauze screen, visible to the audience but not to those playing the part of teachers; rhythmically, while the meeting progresses, the chorus is to chant ha ha ha.
My colleagues drifted in, alone and in pairs. First — always first, with a clean pad of lined yellow paper and a cartridge-belt arrangement of sharpened pencils around his middle — Sam McDougall, a man whose dedication to the principles of grammar could actually cover you with sorrow. Sam had written a long work on the history of punctuation, and though he looked to be the world’s foremost authority on hayseed, he was in fact one of its foremost authorities on the semicolon and the dash. A year ago he had unearthed two comma faults in an article of mine in American Studies, and ever since had chosen to sit next to me at staff meetings to show me the light.
After Sam came our young ladies: Peggy Moberly, everybody’s friend, plain and oval-faced, a girl who in certain sections of our land would probably be considered the prettiest in town; and Charleen Carlisle, with whom — a year and a half before — I had fallen in love for five minutes. She was tall, purple-eyed, and stunning in a haughty way, and the day the Dean had introduced the two of us I had thought he had said her first name was Carlisle. Flustered by her complacent beauty, I melted in the romance of her appellation. But she turned out to be called Charleen and was engaged to an intern at Billings, with whom she bowled twice a week.