“It wasn’t easy, let me tell you.”
They got a little drunk, picked at the food, made love in the living room, and then got drunker still.
“Hey,” Cathy murmured, “you certainly brought home a load of telegrams.”
“I didn’t know I had so many friends.”
“Don’t worry, love. Now that you’re one step from the Oval Office, you’ll discover a lot of brand-new pals. Ah, come on, let’s open some and see who wants to get in good with you.”
They giggled and then started reading.
Naturally, the governor of every state had cabled. Likewise the mayors of important cities. Democrats no less than Republicans. In fact, anyone who harbored aspirations of a diplomatic or political nature.
And even several major personalities from Hollywood.
“Well, one thing’s sure,” Cathy grinned, “I won’t let you travel on your own from now on. Some of these are pretty close to propositions.”
George was savoring it all. Because he knew this was only the beginning. The best was yet to come.
“Hey,” she hailed him boozily. “This one’s a little screwy. Who the hell is ‘Michael Saunders from the good old days’?”
George was puzzled. “Let me see it.”
He studied the telegram and gradually the message became clear.
QUITE A LONG ROAD FROM THE WIENER KELLER EH OLD BOY? YOUR FIRST ENGLISH TEACHER MIKI WISHES YOU SUCCESS. IF YOU’RE EVER IN CHICAGO LOOK ME UP.
“Does that mean anything to you?” his wife inquired.
“Not anymore,” he answered, crumpling the paper and tossing it into the fire.
In the third year of his rebachelored life, Ted Lambros thought of himself as the embodiment of Andrew Marvell’s famous lines. Indeed, he told himself, the poet was unconsciously setting forth the formula for academic success. A professor on his own can really get a lot of work done.
Immediately upon his return to Canterbury, Ted had sold the home on Barrington Road and moved into an apartment at the top of Marlborough House, the best faculty accommodation available.
His triennium as chairman of the Classics Department had been singularly impressive. Enrollments had increased, the number of majors had doubled, and he had even managed to goad his colleagues into publishing a word or two. He had also succeeded in winning tenure for his former student Robbie Walton, the young man who had gotten him to Canterbury in the first place. Lambros always paid his professional debts.
It is arguable whether Ted had been an angry young man, but it was beyond doubt that he was a furious middle-aged one. He was fueled by rage to toil night and day, serenas noctes vigilare, as Lucretius put it.
As soon as he could free himself from paperwork, he would go back to Marlborough House, wolf down a defrosted dinner of dubious nutritional value, and immediately head for his desk.
After the initial hours of intense concentration, he would pour himself a little retsina. Gradually the ingestion of modern Greece’s national drink began to illuminate ancient Greece’s greatest playwright. Ted’s research on Euripides took on a Dionysian cast. And he was determined to uncover all the enigmatic author’s secrets.
He had no social life to speak of. In fact, he refused all invitations, except if he was fairly certain that a high administrator might attend. For the rumor had it that when Tony Thatcher’s term was up, Ted Lambros would be his successor.
In his persistent anger, he still avoided women. That is, emotionally. There were the biological necessities — which now were easier to satisfy at Canterbury. In addition to the usual supply of cast-off first wives, and the young, attractive Europeans whom the college brought over to teach elementary languages, the seventies saw a new influx of mature women.
The government was making a lot of noise about Affirmative Action hiring at senior-faculty levels. And so the administration diligently searched for such rare females lest they risk losing federal subsidies.
Among the bevy of these new profs were several who were not loath to engage in a liaison without sentiment. Especially with Ted Lambros. And not merely because he was attractive. No, these women were just as ambitious as their male counterparts. And just as eager to advance their careers.
Lambros was important. Lambros sat on many a committee. And, one fine spring day — as predicted — Theodore Lambros was named Dean of Canterbury College.
When Ted got back home after receiving the big news, a voice within him suddenly wanted to call out, “Hey, Sara, I’m the goddamn Dean!”
But, of course, no one was there. He lived alone. Determinedly alone. And thought he had convinced himself that he liked it better that way.
Yet, he now had a strangely hollow feeling. Sara had always been there when things were bad, to help him share the hurt. Now he realized that he needed her to share the joy as well. For otherwise it had no meaning in this empty room.
The Dean of Canterbury College is saluted everywhere on campus. But once at home, he loses both his scepter and his crown and becomes an ordinary human being. With ordinary needs.
He’d been a husband and a father once. And now, in this moment of triumph, he realized how he missed the flesh-and-blood dimensions of his life.
One Saturday, two or three weeks earlier, Rob and his wife had forced Ted to go ice skating with them, hoping that the exercise would lift his mood. They had not imagined it would have the opposite effect.
For all Ted saw around him at the rink were fathers and their skating children. Fathers and their children holding hands. Fathers picking up and comforting little ones who’d fallen on the ice.
He longed to put his arms around his son again. And, painful to admit, he also longed for Sara.
Sometimes, late in the night, he’d wake with pangs of loneliness. His only cure was to get up, sit at his desk, and dull the ache with work. He was emotionally dead.
The only part of him he kept alive — by intravenous shots of research — was his intellect. He was close to finishing that goddamn book that would be his academic-passport to a brave new world.
So, if the price of this was solitude, then he would make the most of it.
Only once during this entire time did he succumb to emotion. One evening in the second term that he was dean, his brother, Alex, called to tell him that their father had just died.
He stood there in the cemetery, his arms around his mother and his sister, And he wept.
From across the grave, Alex whispered, “You made him very proud, Teddie. You were the glory of his life,”
Ted could only nod.
That night he returned to Canterbury, sat down at his desk, and started working again.
The telephone rang. It was Sara.
“Ted,” she said softly, “why didn’t you call me? I would have flown over for the funeral.”
“How did you find out?” he asked numbly.
“Someone from the Harvard Department rang me. I’m very sorry. He was a wonderful man.”
“He loved you, too,” Ted answered. And then, taking advantage of this moment, added, “It’s a pity he saw so little of his eldest grandchild.”