Flower dropped me at the gate to the Humanities Building parking lot.
“Are you going in?” She shut the engine off and turned herself toward me.
“Going in. Yes. Why wouldn’t I be going in?”
“I don’t know. I thought maybe your car was parked here or something.”
“I don’t have a car. I’m going in.”
What do I see when I remember her face? Those eyes. In fact they were mind-wrecking. Blue and pitiable and sweet, in their deep dark sockets, though I wish for some other word than sockets. When I looked into them my thoughts just stopped.
“Well, fix your face first. You’re smudgy,” she said. She had a funny way at the ends of her sentences. Rather than a pause, she created a plunge.
“How much was the prize for your dance?”
“One-fifty.”
“That’s not bad.”
“It’s two fifty on the Fourth of July.”
“Maybe I should try to be there,” I told her.
“Sure. I’ll give you a lift,” she said. “Since you don’t have a car.”
I went in through the basement entrance and checked my reflection in a mirror in the men’s room. The wild punch had dented my forehead near the scalp. I didn’t look like a brawler so much as a man who forgot to watch where he was going. I wet my hair and pasted a forelock over the red area and went upstairs to the monthly Department of History coffee klatsch. I was pretty much the last to arrive, and as I entered the small lounge, always to me somehow reminiscent of a prison’s visiting area, they all looked up from their conversations. Then the dozen or so of them welcomed me almost as a reception line, one by one. As if I’d done something special I didn’t know about.
This was curious, even slightly disorienting. I sipped coffee and ate a cookie until their attention drifted away from me and I was left dusting powdered sugar from my fingers.
Tiberius Soames greeted me with a sort of wise and happy weariness. He put his hand on my shoulder. “You’ve been worried about me. And I appreciate that. But no. I’m fine. Yes.”
“You sound all right,” I said. And we went together toward the pair of urns and drew ourselves more completely unnecessary coffee.
Soames seemed to discover the Styrofoam cup in his hand, gulped at it gratefully. “I’ve just got no more stomach for the bitter charade. When my mother died her body was eaten by dogs.”
I tried to think of some words to say. I tried, but I couldn’t. “Dogs?” was the best I could do.
“That’s my message to the world. Why should it be otherwise? Should I disguise the facts concerning our universe?”
“Tiberius—” Many people called him Tibby, but I didn’t know him that well, and anyway he might be going crazy right before our eyes. The situation seemed to call for full names.
This thought brought back the moment I’d had with the patient at the Swan’s Grove campus, with his head trauma and his upraised invisible flame. It seemed just the kind of remark the patient might have made. When my mother died her body was eaten by dogs. Instead the man had given me his name and address and I still had them somewhere among my notes. Robert Hicks.
Tiberius said, “All right then. I’ll stop alarming you and say something trivial and muy apropos. For instance, do you have any German? No. Okay then. You’ll be interested to know that in German klatsch means ‘gossip.’ Here is our wonderful hostess; sprechen zie Deutsch?” he asked as Clara Frenow approached, whisking crumbs from her bosom and getting frosting on her neckline in the process. “At du klatsch we are torn by dogs.”
“I think you said,” she said, “did you say—?”
“Yes, in an attempt to be appropriately trivial and at the same time Germanic just somewhat. Clara. My goddess. Are you the originator of the idea that we should occasionally klatsch together?”
“Uh. Yes,” she said. “Rather I mean — no, Tibby. It’s been a tradition since the seventies.” Clara had completed her round of chemotherapy. She didn’t wear a wig, but covered her patchy baldness with an assortment of caps, baseball caps, knit caps, hats of felt, of straw, a sailor’s hat, today a jaunty blue beret that made her look like an English schoolgirl. For a few weeks her battle had shot her full of fire. She’d been running over with new ideas and seemed to be viewing the materials of her life from a mountaintop. The fight had apparently been successful, the cancer was driven back, and now Clara seemed her sad self again.
And weren’t we all just as sad? These little gatherings where you can smell the sugar, the small cakes. Ours were come-as-you-are, but you couldn’t make these occasions any more bearable by wearing shorts and tennis shoes. Stainless steel urns on brown institutional tables hidden under white paper lace. Professor Frenow in her pitifully jaunty headgear, Tiberius Soames with his fingertips at a floating braille, looking as if the air hurt his skin. He stayed near me but was silent. He smiled a wide terrified distracted smile. I couldn’t tell if he was pained for me or for himself.
The History Department was thriving, thanks entirely to Soames. As a young diplomat in the Haitian government, I believe an assistant to the President’s Chargé d’Affaires, he’d been implicated in a coup conspiracy, quite accurately, he said, and I didn’t doubt him. He escaped to France and received political refugee status, which protected him from extradition. He claimed to have been spirited to Paris by the British MI-6. When he talked of his past he had a habit of stating somewhere invariably in the tale, “All the boys in MI-6 went to the same school and shared a horrible adolescence.” This information meant something to him. He was always turning it over in his mind, apparently, but as far as I know he never got its significance across to any of the rest of us. The kids adored his personal reminiscences, stories that sometimes hijacked whole lecture periods but which he tied to the study of history in a way that illuminated it as the very medium of our lives. Here, after all, stood a man who lived under sentence of death in the land of his fathers. History had done that. He would never return. He’d written half a dozen books, contributed frequently to Foreign Affairs, and had a good exile. Still, it was exile.
Clara rang her spoon against her cup and delivered a toast. A toast to me. The purpose of today’s gathering was to celebrate me. Because I was leaving. Everyone applauded politely.
Apparently they weren’t going to renew my contract. This was news. I’d expected one more appointment, and then the gate. Clara and I had chatted at the end of the previous year and left the subject open; somehow it had closed all by itself. Here I’d been wondering what would happen to me year after next, and it was happening now.
I wondered if, in the shuffle of medicines and sorrows through her recent life, Clara had simply forgotten to discuss this with me. As I tumbled it all over in my mind, smiling and faking my thanks, bitter and relieved, I considered she’d probably at first simply hoped, and finally just presumed, that no discussion was necessary. Out of sheer personal cowardice she may have decided to let that one conversation serve as the final and necessary acknowledgement that, as far as History was concerned, I was history. But that was the style in our Department, and, as far as I knew, in all the other Departments. We conducted our business with a nonconfrontational vagueness which, in the world I’d been formerly a part of, the political realm, had been saved for communication with the voters (the Senator had called them “the votes”). To constituents we equivocated, but behind closed doors nobody minced words.
I heard a female campaign manager say to an aide once, “Do you want to know how a loser stinks? Put your nose in your armpit. Then empty your desk.” Maybe in the academy a distaste for causing pain kept us from shafting one another quite so mercilessly, but I don’t think Clara’s way of firing someone was very much more adroit, and I doubt the young aide clearing out his desk drawers had felt any more astonished and red-faced that day than I did at the moment.