After dessert, Ted took three or four of us up to a parapet above the house. From the third floor a corkscrew staircase entered a dome on the roof, a curious structure like a glassed-in birdcage, about eight feet in diameter, say, and without illumination, so that the little group of us stood suddenly in the night, and in the sky. The weather had cleared, the snow had blown off the glass, and there were stars and moonlit, decorative clouds in the black heavens. “This used to be a sort of widow’s walk,” Ted explained, “but you can see it’s been turned into — well, I don’t know what it was turned into, to tell you the truth. I bring people up here because I’m curious whether it’s something with a recognizable purpose.” None of us recognized its purpose. In the end, I was left up there to ponder it all with a woman named Heidi Franklin, a historian from the Art Department. A friendly but awkward woman, precise and despairing — a homely woman, and I think I have the license to make such a remark, because I’m homely, too, and older than she, so I was homely first. I’m cherubic, baby faced, past fifty but taken for years younger, with cheery blue eyes, and for all of that, homely. In the glittering dark we stood talking very softly, probably about the stars. Heidi may have been interested in a nightcap somewhere downtown; I might have been, too. That neither of us put our finger to the balance, so to speak, and urged it in that direction owed to a sense we probably shared, and I certainly felt, that we’d been left up here alone together by design. If I’d asked, I might have learned that she was single, as I was, or worse, maybe recently divorced, as I was recently widowed.
When I say recently, I don’t mean it in the sense that I might have bought a car recently, or seen a movie recently. I’m speaking as I’d speak about the recent change in the earth’s climate, or the recent war, the recent — I think that’s clear enough. It had been nearly four years, long enough to make me eligible again. Other people seemed to think so, anyway, and I wasn’t going to argue about it.
When it was somehow decided the evening was done, all the guests left together, and the drivers started up their cars and sat inside them with the doors open while everybody said goodbye a second time. Here and there among the evergreens, lumps of snow dropped from branch to branch and down to the ground, yanking at the boughs. We’d all covered ourselves in caps and scarves, all but the lady cellist, who went hatless and carried her coat over her shoulder. In the fluorescent light of the curbside arc lamps she looked ghastly, her blue velvet dress a sudden mournful black. I heard her say three words: “Sane? Or tame?” Her abundant red hair looked purple, her big blue eyes looked fake, inhuman, her lips stood out starkly in her face. She was talking to her date, she didn’t know the rest of us existed, the aging rest of us, the sane, or tame, rest of us. I felt very kindly toward her, glad of her presence, maybe because she was drunk and didn’t care about herself.
“I’m sorry we got sidetracked earlier,” J. J. Stein told me as we parted. “Come around sometime. Just drop in. I’ll show you around the Forum.”
“Terrific. I look forward to it.”
Ted MacKey, a tall, elegantly graying man, stood in the amber warmth behind his windowglass, both hands uplifted in farewell. Ted wasn’t quite as he first appeared. Over the rest of the winter he included me in a couple of other gatherings at his home, much less formal ones, and it turned out that he was a hipster, a gifted trumpeter who enjoyed a connection with all sorts of suave, tight-lipped, soft-spoken jazz musicians from up and down the Mississippi who ate his food, drank his booze, and improvised with him in trios and quartets. Not condescending to him in the least, I might add, but plainly honored to be playing with him, these men, sometimes women, who sent out their souls through their instruments, and otherwise expressed themselves, I noticed, only by tipping their heads, shrugging their shoulders, or slightly lowering their eyelids.
This was also Ted MacKey’s style. Out of context it had seemed professorial. And just as people tended to get him wrong, he and our colleagues tended to get me wrong. I’d come among them as a man in shock, sickened by politics and at that time freshly, as opposed to recently, widowed. In the four years of our very slight acquaintance Ted had reinterpreted my ongoing paralysis as detachment, maybe irony. I was hip, I was beat. I could have sat in with Chet Baker, if I’d known how to play an instrument. As for my fellow teachers of history, they mistook my numbness for terror. They looked at me and saw somebody like J. Alfred Prufrock — looked at me and saw somebody like themselves.
The gatherings at Ted’s were something of a relief. And not just from the meetings and occasional grim dinners with the stick figures we in the Department of History had made ourselves into, but also from the bleakness of my fourth winter here. The monthlong Christmas break was hard on the Department. I stayed in the empty college town, as I’d done every Christmas, and when classes resumed it seemed the other teachers had each, over the holidays, taken on some fearful form of suffering. Clara Frenow, the Chairperson, had been diagnosed with cancer and begun chemotherapy. Meanwhile our only colleague of color and the only one of us with something like a personality, a man named Tiberius Soames, an almost pathologically brilliant West Indian who conducted his large undergraduate lectures with such flourish he’d doubled the number of History majors since his advent here, tumbled suddenly into a psychic abyss and was hospitalized with severe depression. Two weeks after the winter break he was back, fragile and foreign, perpetrating a painful imitation of himself. Others fell under their own bad luck: a son arrested for drugs, a summer home burned to the ground with heirlooms inside, a case of writer’s block and a textbook contract dissolved, and trouble between the young married couple who shared a full-time position.
Myself, I continued as I had for years. I showed up where I was invited. I read a great deal in the library. I went to the movies by myself. I watched the skaters on the campus pond. Quite a bit more than I’d have liked it known, I held imaginary conversations with a man named Bill, in which I went over the same ground I’d been going over since the deaths of my wife and daughter. While I went around looking paralyzed or detached, my thoughts ripped perpetually around a track like dogs after a mechanized rabbit.
Maybe this is why the young skaters looked so comfortable, even on the coldest days. In the daylight hours on what was called the Middle Campus, between the School of Law and the School of Social Sciences, from a dozen to as many as a hundred boys and girls glided around a pond with a tiny unscalable island in its center, a monolithic, rock island with a sculpture on its peak — red sheet-metal shapes — the pond marked off by a railing. Everybody skated around it in one direction. “Pond” may not be the right word. People told me it wasn’t eight inches deep. A reflecting pool, I’d guess; about twice the area of a football field. There were always a few wobbly beginners clinging to the rail, but for the most part these young students sat on the pond’s stone lip while they got on their skates, then stood up to take one long, expert stride onto an invisible carousel. It didn’t look like exercise. No rabbit eluded them. They went in an endless loop, but they weren’t after anything.