Val did not come home that night until almost 3 a.m.
Leonard spent much of his day sitting in his study and sorting listlessly through the untidy stacks and piles of printouts of the various drafts of his huge failed and abandoned novel. Occasionally he would jot a note in his diary, usually questioning how a professor emeritus of English literature and classics could write so badly.
His goal, as he’d told Emilio and only a few others, had been to tell the story of the first third of this new century. But he realized, as he read pages and chapters of his abandoned work at random, all he’d done in his many drafts was to show his own ignorance. His characters were invariably victims of the social forces that had changed America and the world so much in the last twenty-five years, and their actions—such as they were (most of the drafts was just talk)—showed their own lack of understanding of those forces and their own impotence in the face of such change. In other words, his characters’ perceptions were as dulled and buffered by the illusions and comforts of forty years of campus life as Professor George Leonard Fox’s had been.
Leonard dropped pages as he read and had to smile. As he’d told Emilio, he’d attempted the ultimate authorial God-view of Leo Tolstoy and failed. In the end, he would have been happy to have achieved the minor godview of… say… Herman Wouk.
Leonard had read Wouk’s two magnum opuses, The Winds of War and War and Remembrance, in the 1970s and had, along with all the other students and faculty he knew, dismissed them completely as middlebrow historical romances. Clumsy attempts to tell the story of the lead-up to World War II and the Holocaust, and the events themselves, in two huge volumes following scattered members of an American naval family—including the son’s Jewish wife, Natalie, who was shipped to Auschwitz with her Jewish intellectual uncle and her small child. “Wouk chewed more than he bit off,” he’d said wittily—not citing the real source—in an undergraduate course at Yale where the books had come up in some tangential discussion.
But Leonard now realized that Wouk—largely forgotten a third of the way through this following century—had known things about the world. The popular novels were rich with carefully observed detail, whether that applied to the clumsy machinery of a 1940s-era submarine or the more efficient bureaucratic machinery of the Holocaust. And Wouk wrote his forgotten masterpieces as if the salvation of his soul depended upon telling the tale of the Holocaust.
All Leonard’s various drafts of a novel had done was record his passive characters’ confusion—so perfectly matching his own—at why the world was changing for the worse around them.
Leonard tossed the stacks of manuscript into a large box and closed the top.
When had he realized that things in the United States of America were going in the wrong direction… not the wrong direction of a thousand intellectual crying-wolf outcries, the fashionable cries of Marx, Marcuse, Gramsci, Alinsky, and others… but really going to hell in a handbasket?
Recently, for reasons he couldn’t trace, he’d been remembering the early days of the Obama administration. Leonard had been married to his last wife, Nubia, then—certainly the least stressful of his four marriages. And although they were living in Colorado at the time, Leonard teaching at CU Boulder and Nubia heading up the African-American Womyn’s Studies Department at DU in Denver, she had insisted on returning to her hometown of Chicago to be there on the night Obama was elected in 2008. Nubia had been so certain that her candidate would win that she’d booked the flight to Chicago for both of them in August, the day after Obama was nominated at the Democratic Convention in Denver. Nubia had been a delegate at that convention.
They’d stayed at her mother’s house. Nubia’s three brothers and two sisters and all their spouses and kids were there to watch the returns and even before Obama reached the magic number of delegates, everyone had walked over to Grant Park for the final announcement and celebration.
Leonard remembered the cheering and the tears on Nubia’s—and his own—cheeks. Leonard had been ten years old when police attacked protesters in the park not too far from where Obama was acknowledging his victory that night, too young to pay much attention to the turbulent 1960s. This night, with the hundreds of thousands of people streaming into Grant Park and the cheering and weeping and hugging of strangers when the huge TV displays showed CNN announcing Obama reaching the critical delegate number, seemed to be both the past and future of Chicago and America.
Things had been dark, but they had all reached the Promised Land together.
That feeling had faded faster for Leonard than it had for Nubia over the next few years, which was one reason the marriage had ended earlier than it might otherwise have.
It was not that Leonard, an intellectual and proud member and even leader of his faculty tribe then in his early, healthy fifties, had suddenly turned into a closet Republican. No, during all of those years of violent change, Leonard had remained a believer—in hope, in change, in the important role the federal government needed to play in everything from enforcing climate-change regulations to taking control of health care and a thousand other facets of American life.
But over that decade and the next, as the recession seemed to be ending and then slid back into something far worse and seemingly never-ending, as the foreign wars ended in defeat and retreat, and as the government and its many entitlement programs bet wrong on the future and went broke—Leonard began to doubt.
Doubt whether those social decisions toward ever-increasing government deficit spending in the midst of Round One of the great global recession had been the wise thing to do.
Doubt whether America’s eventual retreat from the rising success of radical Islam’s influence around the world was the wisest course.
Doubt whether the United States of America should have claimed its new and more humble role in the second decade of the twenty-first century as “just one nation among many.” Despite Professor George Leonard Fox’s deeply entrenched intellectual skepticism about anything even remotely bordering on vulgar patriotism, hadn’t there been something unique about America… other than its oft-alluded-to offenses of racism, sexism, imperialism, and rampant capitalism?
As the second decade of the century ground on and ground so many people around the world down through bankruptcy, failure, and compromise with violent aggressors, Leonard began to wonder—and even express his questions to Nubia—whether there hadn’t truly been something exceptional to the old view and power of the United States after all.
“I guess I shouldn’t have expected anything more from someone born in the fucking nineteen-fifties,” Nubia had said shortly before she’d left him. “You’ll always live in the fucking nineteen-fifties, along with Senator George McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee.”
He hadn’t corrected her on Joseph McCarthy’s first name. Nubia had been twenty-one years younger than Leonard. And beautiful. He missed her to this day.
But he’d thought her accusation unfair. He’d explained to her once that he didn’t have a very clear memory of the Communist witch hunts of the early 1950s since he’d been born in 1958. Leonard couldn’t even tell her about the love-peace-drugs-rock-music ’60s since he’d only been twelve years old when that decade ended.
He confessed that the actual world around his childhood had seemed… what? A more ordered time. A saner time. A safer time. Even a cleaner time, he realized.