The following Monday — the last week of school before Christmas vacation — Curt returned from class to find him, in jacket and tie, his hair windblown, waiting for him outside his office. He was breathing heavily, his face flushed, as if he had been running hard. Away or toward? he wondered. It was enough that he had returned. Curt invited him in.
They sat silently for a moment, each waiting for the other. The student put his hand inside his jacket, and for a bad moment Parks imagined him pulling out a gun. So that’s how he would be repaid. It was a notebook (withdrawn like a weapon). Rushing the words out in his hoarse voice, he wanted to know, he said, bright-eyed as if feverish, how the historian evaluates conflicting evidence.
Curt sensed that he had come for something else — the madwoman’s purse flapped in his mind like a vulture’s wing — but decided to answer what was asked. History came first. Trust. He wrote frenetically in his notebook as Parks lectured, intent, it seemed, head down, on getting every word. When he asked questions, some were surprisingly naïve, some unanswerable. Was he putting him on? He was more limited than he suspected, concerned more with what he felt than with fact. “You rely too much on instinct,” Curt told him. “If you didn’t begin with the facts, how can your conclusions have any validity?” He expected an argument but he merely wrote it down in his notebook. “You don’t ignore the givens in a math problem, do you? Do you? I thought you were a mathematician.”
“A math student.”
With his colleagues, literal men, Parks tended to argue that history was metaphor. But when an outsider treated his discipline as if it were without hard rules, its truths equally accessible to all, he would rise patriotically to the defense of his profession. He lectured the math student for an hour and a half, carried away by rhetoric, intoxicated. When he was done — the student either stunned into silence or convinced — he knew himself for a liar. How hard it was, he was continually discovering, to tell even approximately the truth.
The student said that he would like to come back on Friday if he could, though offered no explanation for the weeks he had missed.
“I’ll see you on Friday,” Curt said, resisting disenchantment, handing his student the reading list he had worked out for him. “If you can’t make the conference, would you call me?”
He said he would, hung on. “I want to thank you, Mr. Parks, for …”
Curt nodded. The boy left, his sentence unfinished. “It was nothing,” he said silently to the empty office, and was sorry he didn’t ask him, if he had been the one, why he had let the madwoman beat him on the library steps without defending himself.
He noticed that there was something red on the corner of his desk — not an eraser, which was his first idea. It was the head of a rose, its petals mostly gone, badly crushed as if someone had squeezed it in his hand. Was it meant as some kind of gift? He picked it up gingerly, as if it hid a bee, and threw it in his wastebasket. It was still warm. A mutilated rose for the teacher — the idea upset him.
Carolyn, in a rare gesture for her, suggested that he bring his student home for dinner sometime. If well meant, it was badly timed. Suspicious, Curt said he would think about it. “I’m sorry I didn’t give you a son,” she said. “You’re a man who needs a son.” He cried in her arms that night, too tired to make love, dreaming of a son.
On Friday, his office door left open, Rosemary Byrd revisited him. She was wearing a black jumper with a silver pin of a snake (its eye gold) above her right breast. Without perfume, her hair in a severe bun, she looked older, as if crisis or sickness had aged her.
“I know,” she said miserably. “You’re expecting your tutorial student at any minute.”
He said, moved by her sadness, that they could talk until he came, his student due unfortunately in five minutes.
“I wrote you a letter,” she said, sitting down tentatively on the chair next to his desk.
“What kind of letter?” He glanced at the open door to see if he was waiting; the hall empty.
Rosemary shook her head, reached into her shoulder bag, came out empty-handed. “I’m terribly embarrassed,” she said. “I know I’m behaving like a child.”
“I’m embarrassed, too,” he admitted.
Rosemary sat with her hands covering her face.
He suspected what was wrong but didn’t know what to say or what he wanted.
Studying the girl, he had the sensation of being watched — someone at the door — though when he looked up there was no one.
His nervousness about the time made it hard for him to attend to Miss Byrd, who was, her face uncovered, smiling at him.
“How many children do you have?” she was asking.
“Two” came to mind but, in fact, he remembered, it was, “One. A girl.”
Rosemary nodded. “I had a dream,” she said, “in which you were my father. You took me to the movies.” She laughed and the snake danced on her breast.
“I’m flattered,” he said, distracted, wondering if, seeing Miss Byrd in his seat, Christopher had come and gone.
“I just want you to know,” she said, getting up, “that I won’t make things difficult for you.”
Curt offered to take her for coffee at the end of the day.
She said no, she had to run, not moving. “Have a marvelous Christmas.” He wished her the same. She touched his shoulder wistfully and was gone.
He waited another hour with burgeoning anger. “If I were his father,” he said to himself, “I’d spank the piss out of the son of a bitch.” Then went home.
Two days later, his phone rang after midnight and when he answered, disturbed at so late a call, no one answered. He put it down to a wrong number, but the same thing happened the next night. “Who was it?” Carolyn asked in her suspicious voice. He said no one. “How sad,” she said, pulling the covers over her head, “that no one calls.”
The next night, about the same time, no one, who was someone, called again. Curt raged into the phone, threatened the police if the calls continued. It could have been anyone, conceivably even a stranger who had picked his name at random, but he strongly suspected, not knowing which, one of the two of them.
The phone calls stopped, though not his wife’s suspicions. “I’m glad she has the decency not to call anymore.”