I looked down, once again shrinking a little, struggling to sort out my confusion. Was it possible, I wondered, that it had been someone else, some malicious prankster, who’d written that letter inviting me up? But I’d mentioned the letter on the phone; it was Agaard who’d written it, all right. Had he changed his mind, then? gotten cold feet? Perhaps one couldn’t blame him; I’d have to know more about his son to judge. Certainly if he wanted me to leave, I’d leave at once. I should let him know that. I glanced at my watch, then at Agaard. “Good heavens, it’s after four,” I said. “I have a plane to catch at eight.” Only as I said it did I hear how ridiculous it sounded. Trying to save myself, I said, “Does it take long to get to the airport?”
“Twenty minutes,” I thought he’d say with a murderous sneer and a baa; but again he surprised me completely. He leaped up and went to the window, then blanched. With a voice and expression that might have been extreme alarm, he said, “Look! It’s snowing! You have a plane out tonight?”
“It’s at eight,” I repeated uncertainly, guardedly.
Professor Agaard stood perfectly still for an instant, hands clasped tightly, torso cocked forward, staring as if in growing surprise at the storm. At last he shook his head and turned back to me, eyes narrowed, stepping grimly toward his chair. “It will never take off,” he said. “Right to the last minute they’ll say the planes are flying, and then, with apologies, they’ll post a one-hour delay, and then another, and then another; what do they care?” He gave a laugh, waving one arm. “The airport can be packed like a can of sardines, people can be sleeping all over the floors, little children can be bawling, they’ll go right on lying — company policy, not to mention human nature! Baa! Take my word for it, Winesap.” He closed his right hand on the back of his chair. “They’ll never take off. I know these storms out of Canada. I’ve lived here for fifteen years.” He seemed to consider sitting down, eyebrows driven inward toward the bridge of his nose, eyeballs slightly bulging, then decided to remain standing.
Again I was baffled. It sounded for all the world as if, despite the sneer, the misanthropic snarl, he was asking — almost begging — that I stay over, keep him company. The thought, I must confess, made me shudder. “Well—” I began. I sat motionless in my spindly little chair, or rather hovered just above it, my elbows rigid, weightless on the arms.
“No, no,” he said emphatically, clicking his dentures and bending stiffly toward the teapot, “it will never take off. I doubt that you could even get a taxi in weather like this.” He shot an angry or maybe terrified look at the window.
I too looked. It was like night out; a gloomy, shifting marchland beyond which lay heaven knew what.
“Of course we have beds here — no shortage of beds, such as they are!” He gave his sharp little baa, his expression triumphant. “Here, have more tea,” he said, and hurriedly came at me with the pot.
HE WAS A difficult man — never in my life had I met a man more difficult, now snivelling, now snarling, now cackling with glee, always with his mind somewhere else, I had a feeling, turning over and over that secret or guilty confession he couldn’t quite find it in his heart to let loose of, much as he might wish to — stroking it with his fingers, clutching it greedily to his bosom, watching me, his chosen antagonist, with unrelenting vigilance in his dim, crafty little eyes. It was not just his son, I was by now persuaded; he’d made graver mistakes than by chance giving life to a “monster,” as he’d called him. I gave the old man time, sitting there opposite him, our shoes almost touching. It was surely true that no planes would be flying from Madison that night. If Agaard was a mystery, both generally speaking and from moment to moment, I needn’t be in any great hurry to get to the bottom of it. I’d figure him out. And of course the old man was hoping I’d catch him; or a part of him was. I had nothing to lose, nothing except the chance, back in the city, of finding more congenial company — if nothing else, the tinny cheer of some motel TV. I began to enjoy myself. En garde, Agaard! It was you who threw the glove!
At the moment Professor Agaard was busy bringing it to my attention that, like most members of the human race, I am a scoundrel. “‘Pseudo-history,’” he said, with a scornful little head-shake. I blinked, not sure whether it was a joke or a slip of the tongue, and tentatively corrected him, my tone ironic: “Psycho-history.” He nodded, accepting the revision without interest, giving the air a little bat with the back of his hand. He made a face as if, either way, the term repelled him, as no doubt it did. I couldn’t really blame him. I’d felt that way myself when it first became popular, mostly in connection with fanciful, unfriendly biographies. We’d shifted to wine now, the old man trying to trick himself, perhaps. He was drinking rather quickly, as if his throat were parched and the wine had no more taste than water. In point of fact, I might mention, the wine was excellent. It surprised me a little that, disliking me as he did, the professor hadn’t brought out Gallo. The fire beside us had burned down to a few glowing embers. The cat was asleep. Old Agaard had resisted my every effort to turn the conversation to his son, ducking in distress from every faintest hint, willing to chatter like a magpie on any and every subject but the one that, we both knew, had brought me to his house. “What a curious thing for an intelligent man to spend his life on!” he said. “‘Pseudo-history’! I take it you call yourself a ‘pseudo-historian’? Baa!” His face had grown whiter as the room grew more murky; it was as if he had on powder.
I thought of correcting him again. Was he deaf, or was it simply that once Agaard got an idea in his head it was there, firm as bedrock, to the end? I decided to let it pass. I smiled, in fact. Pseudo-history. Why not? It had a ring to it. Anyway, our point of disagreement was substantive — never mind the name!
“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “I think one could spend one’s life in worse ways.” The backs of my legs ached from the strain of keeping part of my weight off the chair. My gestures were constricted — a thing I never like — by my wish to do no harm to his miserable antique. “It’s true,” I said, “that psycho-history is not always a terribly serious pursuit. It’s sometimes trivial, nothing more than a pleasant entertainment — not that that’s all bad.” I flashed him a smile. “I mean of course studies of the ‘deeper implications’ of Lyndon Johnson’s bathroom jokes, or the social attitudes secreted away in castration imagery in the tales of Paul Bunyan. Yet we learn things, here and there. Any way of looking at the past is still looking at the past.” I glanced at him, carefully waving my wine glass. Again his eyebrows were rammed inward against his nose. “We’re after the same things you are, you know. The twists of human pride, humanity’s age-old survival tricks.”
“Pah!” he said, then laughed. “Baa!”
It annoyed me, of course. No one likes his life’s work dismissed quite so lightly, not even a man who, like myself, holds all effort to be at least partly vanity, a heroic, death-defying labor of bees making honey that will rot in a season. To cover my annoyance — and perhaps nervousness (he did, of course, make one conscious of limitations) — I put my wine glass on the floor beside my foot, got my pipe and tobacco out, and began to load the bowl. I prudently stopped myself from asking if he’d mind if I smoked. “As I’m sure you know,” I said, soberly catching and holding his eye, “our work is no more fanciful than the next man’s, in the end. All history at least from the days of Thucydides is in a way ‘pseudo-history,’ as you call it — the tale of human struggle as it’s told by the side that won.”