It was like driving through the back lot of a movie studio— the new hotels and office buildings that reshaped the skyline seemed illusory, like film sets built over the actual face of the past. After New York, the city seemed unbelievably clean and quiet. I wondered if the troubling, disorderly city I remembered had disappeared behind a thousand face-lifts.
"I suppose Arkham College looks like Stanford these days," I said.
He grunted. "No, Arkham's the same old rock pile it always was. We get by. Barely."
"How did you wind up there in the first place?"
"Come to think of it, which I seldom do, that must seem a little strange."
I waited for the story.
"I went there because of a specific man, Alan Brookner, who was the head of the religion department. He was famous in my field, I mean really famous, one of the three or four most significant people in the field. When I was in graduate school, I hunted down everything he'd ever written. He was the only real scholar at Arkham, of course. I think they gave him his first job, and he never even thought about leaving for a more glamorous position. That kind of prestige never meant anything to him. Once the school realized what they had, they let him write his own ticket, because they thought he'd attract other people of his stature."
"Well, he attracted you."
"Ah, but I'm not even close to Alan's stature. He was one of a kind. And when other famous religious scholars came out here, they generally took one look at Arkham and went back to the schools they came from. He did bring in a lot of good graduate students, but even that's fallen off a bit lately. Well, considerably, to tell you the truth." John Ransom shook his head and fell silent for a moment.
Now we were driving past Goethe Avenue's sprawling stone mansions, long ago broken up into offices and apartment houses. The great elms that had lined these streets had all died, but Goethe Avenue seemed almost unchanged.
"I gather that you became quite close to this professor," I said, having forgotten his name.
"You could say that," Ransom said. "I married his daughter."
"Ah," I said. "Tell me about that." After Vietnam, he had gone to India, and in India he had turned back toward life. He had studied, meditated, studied, meditated, courted calm and won it: he would always be the person who had burrowed through a mountain of dead bodies, but he was also the person who had crawled out on the other side and survived. In all of this, he had a Master, and the Master had helped him see over the horrors he had endured. His Master, the leader of a small following containing only a few non-Indians like Ransom, was a young woman of great simplicity and beauty named Mina.
After a year in the ashram, his nightmares and sudden attacks of panic had left him. He had seen the other side of the absolute darkness into which Vietnam had drawn him. Mina had sent him intact out into the world again, and he had spent three years studying in England and then another three at Harvard without telling more than half a dozen people that he had once been a Green Beret in Vietnam. Then Alan Brookner had brought him back to Millhaven.
A month after he began working at Arkham under Brookner, he had met Brookner's daughter, April.
John thought that he might have fallen in love with April Brookner the first time he had seen her. She had wandered into the study to borrow a book while he was helping her father organize a collection of essays for publication. A tall blond athletic-looking girl in her early twenties, April had shaken his hand with surprising firmness and smiled into his eyes. "I'm glad you're helping him with this muddle," she had said. "Left to his own devices, he'd still be getting mixed up between Vorstellung and vijnapti, not that he isn't anyhow." The incongruity between her tennis-player looks and allusions to Brentano and Sanskrit philosophy surprised him, and he grinned. She and her father had exchanged a few good-natured insults, and then April wandered off toward her father's fiction shelves. She stretched up to take down a book. Ransom had not been able to take his eyes off her. "I'm looking for a work of radically impure consciousness," she said. "What do you think, Raymond Chandler or William Burroughs?" The title of Ransom's dissertation had been The Concept of Pure Consciousness, and his grin grew wider. "The Long Goodbye," he said. "Oh, I don't think that's impure enough," she said. She turned over the book in her hands and cocked her head. "But I guess I'll settle for it." She showed him the title of the book she had already selected: it was The Long Goodbye. Then she dazzled him with a smile and left the room. "Impure consciousness?" Ransom had asked the old man. "Watch out for that one," said the old man. "I think her first word was virtuoso." Ransom asked if she really knew the difference between Vorstellung and vijnapti. "Not as well as I do," Brookner had grumped. "Why don't you come for dinner next Friday?" On Friday, Ransom had shown up embarrassingly overdressed in his best suit. He had still enjoyed dinner, yet April was so much younger than he that he could not imagine actually taking her out on a date. And he was not sure he actually knew what a "date" was anymore, if he ever had. He didn't think it could mean the same thing to April Brookner that it did to him—she'd want him to play tennis, or spend half the night dancing. She looked as if she relished exertion. Ransom was stronger than he appeared to be (especially when he was wearing a banker's suit). He jogged, he swam in the college pool, but he did not dance or play tennis. His idea of a night out involved an interesting meal and a good bottle of wine: April looked as if she would follow a couple of hours of archery with a good fast run up one of the minor Alps. He asked her if she had liked the Chandler novel. "What a poignant book," she said. "The hero makes one friend, and by the end he can't stand him. The loneliness is so brutal that the most emotional passages are either about violence or bars." "Deliver me from this young woman, Ransom," Brookner said. "She frightens me." Ransom asked, "Was virtuoso really her first word?" "No," April said. "My first words were senile dementia."
About a year ago, the memory of this remark had ceased to be funny.
There had been a courtship unlike any Ransom had ever experienced. April Brookner seemed to be constantly assessing him according to some impenetrably private standard. April was very sane, but her sanity transcended normal definitions. Ransom later learned that two years earlier she had backed out of marriage with a boy who had graduated from the University of Chicago with her because—in her words—"I realized that I hated all his metaphors. I couldn't live with someone who would never understand that metaphors are real." She had recognized the loneliness in the Chandler novel because it echoed her own.
Her mother had died in April's fourth year, and she had grown up the brilliant daughter of a brilliant man. After graduating Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude from Chicago, she moved back to Millhaven to do graduate work at the Millhaven branch of the University of Illinois. April never had any intention of teaching, but she wanted to be near her father. Ransom sometimes felt that she had married him because she couldn't think of anything else to do.
—Why me?, Ransom had asked her once.
—Oh, you were obviously the most interesting man around, she said. You didn't act like a jerk just because you thought I was beautiful. You always ordered just the right thing in Chinese restaurants, you were kind of experimental, and my jokes didn't make you mad. You didn't act like your mission in life was to correct me.