John noticed the swelling of her chest and a slight shift of her hips as he spoke.
“But I have to go,” he added. “If you want to talk more about it come to my office any Tuesday or Thursday, four to six. That is, except today. I like my lectures to simmer after the first class.”
“Thank you, Professor,” Tamala said, looking down shyly; then she moved quickly past the dean and out the door.
Theron approached the lectern smiling.
“That was magnificent,” he said.
They clasped hands and held each other’s gaze a moment.
Dean James was the shorter by an inch or so but his shoulders were broad; his demeanor was more that of a car salesman than a scholar. His gray suit was of a business cut. There was a scar under the left eye making John suspect that Theron had a rough life before entering the halls of academe.
But, John advised himself, it might just be a trophy from a tough game of rugby at Oxford.
“Thank you, Theron.”
“You know they argued against us hiring you,” the dean said. “I was warned that you weren’t old enough, didn’t have the experience. Professors across the line tried to convince me that your brand of study would undermine the history department. But I knew you would engage the students in a way that no other professor could.”
“I do love it,” Woman said. “Students are ready for deeper thinking than they know. My job is to tease it out of them.”
“Teaching them,” Theron added, “that they will be the ones making history rather than just becoming aggrandized, half-blind scribes.”
As always John was impressed by the dean’s keen perceptions. He thought of an essay he’d never write — “The Subtlety of Car Salesmen.”
“You just passing by handing out compliments, Theron?”
That familiar huckster smile crossed the shepherd scholar’s lips.
“You haven’t published since coming here,” he said. “It’s only been two years but two can turn into ten before you know it.”
“Recently I’ve come up with an idea about academia and car salesmen,” John said. “Maybe that will be my first.”
“The history department review committee will be meeting soon,” Dean James posited, his smile gone.
“And I’m at the head of the list,” John said.
“They’ll want to hear about the paper you’ve already proposed.”
2
After the Dean left John sat in Justin Brown’s half-desk chair. Leaning back, gazing at the green lectern, he assessed the lecture, wondering what it was the students had learned.
No one can know what is in another person’s heart, Herman Jones said. This was not a memory per se, but was as if John’s father was somehow embedded in the emptiness of the classroom, there in spirit as a hopeless optimist might opine.
John put this thought aside because of Theron James’s warnings: you haven’t published and the history department review committee will be meeting.
Then there was Carlinda Elmsford. She was... unexpected. A student who easily engaged with ideas, so intent that the class felt threatening to her...
... to her soul, phantom Herman Jones said, completing the thought.
John sighed in his chair. He reacted similarly to the beginning of every semester. The first class was where he was the most lucid, certain and self-confident; but directly afterward he felt fragmented, unable to keep his mind on any one subject for long. He usually conjured his father at these times, though not so much as to actually hear a voice... And he’d reexperience delivering the third blow to Chapman Lorraine’s skull. That solitary act defied John’s deconstructionist prowess. Once again he was Cornelius Jones. Once again he was vulnerable, culpable... identifiable.
The exultation of life in the university was stalked by guilt, a dogged predator snapping at the heels of a noble elk — and John stood between the two...
You were a boy, Herman said without sound or substance. He was a man and should have shown restraint.
Twenty minutes later he stood up from the half-desk, walked toward the red outline and blundered out of the empty room into the sheltered hall, where students, and a professor or two, walked with purpose in the long passageway that circumnavigated the open inner wall.
He was thinking about Herman, about how his father should have been there instead. In that hermeneutical instant he felt his father’s smile.
What you have done is good, the elder said, momentarily free from the grave, but not yet (at the level of) Thucydides — not yet a man of his age documenting the world while participating in its unfolding.
John stopped there at the railing, in the middle of the great architectural achievement of NUSW. The ghost of his father had never spoken to him before. Herman Jones was a mild man who would not, even as a spirit, haunt anyone. He was too gentle and considerate to bring fear, pain or disorientation to the soul of another.
“I’m exhorting him,” John whispered. “No, I am calling on him because there is a danger somewhere.”
He looked down from the high floor of the hollow structure. Green light filtered through the roof, tinting the rotunda and the people laughing, eating and reading on the alabaster benches below. He could hear voices but an acoustic trick garbled the words, making them turn in on themselves so that although they still contained humanity, the meaning was stripped away.
And so language, sweet language, Herman had said years before, stays alive. All the so-called dead tongues survive in the words extant today. That is just another example of how you cannot know history but at the same time you will not escape it.
John wasn’t resisting his father’s presence now. He was exhausted from the desert heat, the self-imposed challenge of teaching without notes and the threat contained in the words of Theron James...
“Professor Woman?”
“Yes?” he said, turning.
It was a young woman in a dark red dress that was formfitting at the bodice but which flared out on its way down to her knees. It was an old-fashioned outfit reminiscent of the fifties TV shows John sometimes watched on late night.
She was a bright brown girl with almond-shaped dark eyes. The young professor did not know her.
“I looked up your class schedule and it said that Decon met in Hall Thirty-Six,” she said, her tone imparting an apology. “I was waiting outside but when the class was over it wasn’t yours at all.”
“I taught Decon, as you call it, in Thirty-Six my first two years,” John said.
“I guess they didn’t enter the new number in the semester schedule,” she said. And then, “I’m Tyne, Tyne Oliver.”
“And why were you looking for me, Ms. Oliver?”
“Oh,” she replied lifting her shoulders to express the recognition of her oversight, “sorry. President Luckfeld.”
John raised his eyebrows and turned his left palm up. He was enjoying the dysfunction of the conversation: her speaking in fragments and his resorting to sign language.
“He wants to see you,” she added.
“President Luckfeld does?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“Right after your class,” Tyne replied. “I got there five minutes before it was supposed to be through but then it wasn’t you. Dean James saw me and asked why I looked so confused.”
“And he sent you to room two.”
Tyne Oliver smiled and nodded.
Herman Jones receded into the ether. John was aware of him as he was of the tinted sunlight and the television shows that were brought to mind by the cut of Tyne Oliver’s dress.