Dear Professor Cannon, he read, I find it remarkable and interesting that vandals would actually steal the top 31 feet of a pyramid, and I can’t understand why they would have wanted to do something like this, which doesn’t seem to make much sense. But I suppose there have always been certain people, even away back then, who would go to any trouble to do something that someone else wouldn’t want them to do.
I understand that pyramids are built of great blocks of stone that weigh tons and tons apiece, and I must say that taking off the top 31 feet seems to me to be even a greater waste of time and effort than putting them up in the first place.
I’m sorry that I don’t know how to solve this problem, but I hope you don’t feel that it is your fault, that you weren’t a good teacher or anything like that, because it is my own fault entirely in that I don’t seem to be able to care much about trigonometry or how big a pyramid was.
The truth is, you are the very best teacher I’ve ever had in anything, and it is a pleasure to listen to you talk and watch you show how to do things on the blackboard, even though I don’t quite understand what you are saying or showing.
I suppose I shall be put out of the class at the end of the term for not having learned anything, but I hope you will let me stay until then, at least, because I enjoy it so much for the reasons I have mentioned. Sincerely, Margaret McCall.
Refolding the paper, he leaned back and smiled, making a little tent of fingers tip to tip above his chest, elbows braced on the arms of his chair.
He conceded that Maggie McCall was nothing short of a remarkable phenomenon — altogether the most interesting specimen of college life that he had uncovered as a pedagogue. Or, for that matter, as anything else. And this covered a considerable area, to tell the truth, for Brad was especially sensitive to the enchantment of female students, as well as females in other categories, and it was one of his secret regrets that his particular forte was mathematics, inasmuch as enrollment in his classes was thereby rather severely limited. If he were teaching in another department, say English or Education, his sensitivity would have been exposed to a much more numerous and varied collection of stimulants.
This brought him, in his reflections, to one of the more curious matters relative to Miss Maggie McCall. How the hell, he wondered, had she ever managed to get into his trigonometry class?
It was assumed, naturally, that anyone enrolled in trig had satisfied certain essential prerequisites, such as algebra and geometry, but there was not the slightest evidence that Miss McCall knew any more about the latter than the former, which was about as much as you could teach a cat in three easy lessons. It was certain that her record had been checked upon enrollment, however, which indicated that these essential subjects were on her transcript, if not in her head.
Brad, who possessed his share of professional cynicism, was reasonably certain how this had come to pass, and it could be safely deduced from the evidence that Miss McCall, although abysmally ignorant in certain areas, was by no means stupid, and that she was, on the contrary, master of a technique for acquiring unearned credits that was palpably admirable and probably exciting.
Feeling again the pleasant prickliness, Brad got up and walked over to the windows and assumed his former position, hands holding each other at the base of his spine.
Using a short focus, he examined briefly his own reflection, taking note of the thick brown hair parted cleanly at the side and worn rather long over the ears in order to display the dusting of gray that made such an intriguing contrast with his boyish face.
He was a handsome man, no question about that. He had, in fact, often been compared in appearance with the late Ronald Coleman, and there was indeed a genuine resemblance, except that he, Brad, wore no mustache and had the added attraction of dimples. He looked a good ten years younger that he was, and he felt in certain respects ten years younger than he looked.
Lengthening his focus, he sought the red squirrel among the walnut trees and could not find him.
Releasing his right hand from his left, he looked at his watch for no good reason except that he was restless and rather bored with the prospect of classes until three o’clock, which was, suddenly, an hour of the day that he was impatient to have arrive.
2
Bradley Cannon was a charming man, and he had been a charming boy. He had been, by all reliable reports, a charming baby. This was undoubtedly true, for one does not change all at once in an instant, and one of Brad’s earliest memories was that of being fussed over by a group of admiring women who had come to play bridge with his mother.
He was very young at the time, possibly three, and he had thick golden hair, later to darken, and large solemn brown eyes that could be made to twinkle in response to proper attention. His manners were enchanting, even then, and since his mother claimed that they had been so from the beginning, as evidenced by a serene and considerate infancy at play and breast, it must be assumed that he learned them as an amiable embryo in the womb.
Moreover, to make almost too much of a good thing, he had a lively intelligence that found expression in an early ability to walk and talk and read from a primer.
These qualities prompted one of the first bits of surly criticism of the type that Brad was to receive frequently later from disgruntled males.
To be precise, however, it was not really criticism of Brad, but of his mother, and it was not so much criticism as slander. A neighboring husband and father was known to have remarked in company that such a paragon of brains and beauty could hardly have been the issue of Cannon, Senior, who had little of the former and none of the latter, and that he must have been, consequently, an outside job.
At any rate, Brad became aware easily and early of his capacity to charm, especially members of the opposite sex, and admiration was part of his basic conditioning. He learned first to expect it, and later he developed a strong compulsion to attract it, at any price, in every instance where he decided for one reason or another that he particularly wanted it.
In his tender years, this excessive need for essential admiration was, of course, a simple sort of thing that was adequately satisfied by little attentions and cooing confirmations of his superior attributes. But as he grew to puberty the need naturally developed glandular complications.
In the ideational readjustment brought on by glands, he discovered that there is, as between male and female, a specific biological consummation of physical attraction if it is thoroughly exercised — a kind of definitive capitulation of the female to the male, or possibly vice versa in cases involving males less dominant than he.
Being intelligent, he had correctly analyzed this quite some time before he was prepared to test it, and if in the initial testing, when it came, the conquest turned out to be somewhat more vice versa than otherwise, there was at least sufficient question about it that he was able with some justification to claim a draw.
His partner in this rather mutual conquest was a young lady, the daughter of a prosperous jeweler, who lived in the next block east of the Cannon’s modest home. Brad was fifteen at the time, but he was in his senior year of high school, thanks to having skipped a couple of years as a result of diligence and ability. The young lady, whose name was Fern, was five years older and two grades higher. A sophomore in college, she was currently at home for the Easter holiday.