Выбрать главу

I dared to sip the drink before me. Its astringent taste and a brief indecision about attempting to speak plus a quick mental chase after the quotation — Byron — all conspired to gag me. I doubled over, coughing, and almost upset the drink.

“Down the wrong way?” said Furberry, but made no saving move. “I wanted to be honest with Sophie,” he said.

Now my mind made another search. Oh yes. Sophie Hennington was Professor Hennington’s widow. I recalled that I had heard something about Sophie and Furberry going about together, but the private lives of my fellow faculty have never been of much interest to me. Now I recalled the face — and, oh yes, the Opera Guild meeting last year. She had given a little talk, reminiscing about the time John McCormack visited her mother — she had been a mere babe at the time, of course, she had said, and the assembly had laughed politely as she smiled and pushed a bit at the too-red hair framing her Irish face, her charm bracelet jingling pleasantly along with the laughter of the crowd — but less pleasantly, I fear, during the pregnant pauses of the tenor aria which followed her talk.

Furberry continued. “I said, ‘Sophie, of course there were others. We are mature people, Sophie. A lovely woman like you is sure to have had love affairs herself.’ I guess I should have said a while ago, twice-in-a-lifetime is love to Sophie, for she began to tell me of her late Homer and the real devotion of their love for each other. Oh, Poffering, how that woman talks! Much as I admire her outgoing manner, her joie de vivre, I must say that Sophie never lets anyone but herself say anything. ‘Harold,’ she said, ‘there is true love, and there is philandering. I have seen how ladies flock about you at parties, and I have heard about’ ” — Furberry paused — “ ‘about that infamous banana.’ ”

“Yes,” I said, still not daring another sip of the Tio Paco.

“She wants me to give up my banana! She has even threatened to come in and snatch it off my wall. She suspects—” he leaned forward, whispering “—that it was a gift from a lady.”

“Was it?”

Furberry grinned brightly. “And if it was, Poffering, if it was? No, Poffering, I will not let Sophie take away my banana. Whatever she thinks about it, it is my banana. So much for Sophie! A marriage cannot be founded upon such a start.” He took a big swallow of his drink and sat back in the booth as if everything had been unalterably settled. His eyes gleamed with determination and Tio Paco, and although leaning against the midnight plastic booth pushed his hairpiece a little forward he did not notice it.

“Furberry — Harold—” I said, for my own few sips of Paco were making me bold “—is a banana really worth it? I mean, if you and Mrs. Hennington have gone so far as to consider marriage—”

“No!” he thundered at me. “No, no, no! There are other bonnie lassies around. Have you perhaps noticed Miss Lakey, the new teaching assistant in our department? Such a scholarly mind, such damask beauty—”

Indeed I had noticed Miss Lakey and, while she was usually all business, not one to giggle and make conversation, she had been invited to confer in the inner sanctum many times, and I had seen Furberry accompany her solicitously, the two smiling and laughing, to the outer office door, Hagachoff’s pruney disapproval affecting them not a whit.

It was seven P.M. by the blue-lit clock in the bar, and my stomach’s urgings prompted a suggestion to leave. Furberry was unwilling at first, but he yielded, and we made our way at last from twilight within to twilight without. I dropped him at a house across the street from the East Campus. It seemed that he parked his vintage MG in the driveway of Sophie’s abode every day and, as he said, “enjoyed the salutary briskness” of a walk to West Campus, where our offices were located.

Through my rear-view mirror I saw him adjust his black beret and drive off. And did he make a vulgar gesture at the curtained windows of the house’s upper story? Yes, I fear he did.

Our “drinking buddy” relationship, Furberry’s and mine, did not extend into the next day. Furberry was his old, detached, smoothly sophisticated self, and I was again the forever paper-grading resident of an adjacent box in the English office. The resumed distance between us did not disturb me. I was, in fact, grateful not to be involved in the splintered mosaic of his love life, but I couldn’t help noticing that Furberry and Miss Lakey were often together in the hall, in animated conversation over the drinking fountain or paused on a stairway landing for a moment’s discourse. And I noticed that the banana remained in its accustomed place on his wall.

In the days to follow, Furberry took to wearing a red rose in his tweedy buttonhole, and — yes, I’m sure of it — he had a new, less treacherous hairpiece. During this time he hummed a good deal and was pleasant enough to Miss Hagachoff, to the student help, Bonnie and Betty, and to me. Thus we were unprepared for the day when his mood suddenly changed.

That day Hagachoff was rudely ordered to bring certain files up to date, the student help was rebuked for bringing their social lives into the office, and several odious teaching assignments were given out for the next term. My assignment was certainly no winner, but I noticed that Miss Lakey’s was even worse — a large class of Freshman English students at a particularly inconvenient time of day. Now, in places of more prestige than Poverton College teaching assistants never get anything other than Freshmen to teach, so Miss Lakey’s assignment would not be surprising. However, I couldn’t help but observe Miss Lakey and young Dr. Rogers together here and there in much the same circumstances as I had earlier observed her and Furberry. In any case, Furburry was in another snit, and he stayed that way, seemingly feeling no obligation to oil the troubled waters this time.

Then one morning I arrived at the office after my ten o’clock class and found everything in an uproar. Miss Hagachoff’s glasses had skied lugubriously onto her neatly arranged desk, and she stood white and shaking.

“I... I don’t know, Professor — only for a moment was I out of the office — you know it was only a moment!”

The furious Furberry turned on me as I entered. “You, Poffering — where is my banana?”

“Ba-ba-nana?” I stuttered.

“My banana is missing. It was there last night, and you and Hagachoff were still here when I left.”

I tried to remember. “Yes,” I said, “but—”

“Was it here when you left?”

How the hell do I know? was what I wanted to say but I merely murmured, “I don’t know.” He vented his wrath on me, Miss Hagachoff, and the student help at great length, then angrily left the office.

“Haggy,” I finally said — and realized two hours later that while I had used the diminutive affectionately it was not a flattering one — “will you please go to Dr. Rogers’ office and ask him for his final roll?”

Miss Hagachoff needed to get out of there and was most grateful for the opportunity.

Following were days of gloom and grey, inside and often out, days of trickling umbrellas and of ill concealed snifflings (Hagachoff’s). Furberry was very late to work most days, and cold and curt to all of us.

The first banana missive arrived on a Friday, but I didn’t know about it until the Tuesday after when a strange lady stopped me outside Staunton Hall and pressed upon me, suddenly and inexplicably, a package and a letter addressed to Furberry. There were no words spoken, just a collision of umbrellas, and before I could realize the situation she had sloshed away into the crowds of class-bound students.

Bewildered, I made delivery to a seemingly work-absorbed Furberry, who accepted the package without a word and waved me thither — only to come to my door just as I sat down at my desk and, motioning incoherently, and red-faced, indicate that I should follow him back into his office. There, he shut the door.