Starting Over

by Dan Wakefield

  He walked a lot. Every morning he walked the eight blocks into Harvard Square, where he bought the Boston Globe and The New York Times and went to breakfast at a cafeteria on Brattle Street where you could sit and pore over the papers, refill your coffee, and not be rushed into eating up and moving on. After breakfast he walked down to the Charles and strolled along the banks. Occasionally he found a game of touch football he could get into. That was one of the best things. The running and jumping and throwing and blocking that brought sweat to the body also washed the mind clean. He would walk home pleasantly aching and exhausted, take long showers, get into his bathrobe, and settle down to read. He hadn’t read so much in years—not only books for his courses, but novels in paperback whose titles he had bandied about at cocktail parties with the bluff assurance he got from culling descriptions in reviews. Around midnight he would flick on the tube and burrow into bed for the talk shows and late movies that, with enough Scotch, usually got him to sleep.

  He thought of it not as a bad time, but a “thin” one. He had found that time itself changes in different periods of one’s life—sometimes it seems fat with events and decisions, victories and defeats, each moment full—and in other periods time seems thin, one-dimensional, the hours long and slender, stretched like a wire. It was that kind of time now and he accepted it, moved with it. Patiently. Restrained. Carefully hopeful.

  The week before the fall semester began at Gilpen Junior College, Potter was invited to a cocktail party at the home of Dean Hardy. The Dean lived in Cambridge in an old but socially suitable two-story frame house convenient to the shrines of Harvard, whose mere physical presence gave him comfort, and, as he admitted with what seemed to Potter a lascivious smile, “stimulation.”

  The Dean had rented a Harvard student, handsomely blond and red-jacketed, to serve as bartender, and also had on hand a glum professor of history from Harvard, who sighed and jingled the change in his right-hand pocket a lot, and whose conversation mainly consisted of gruff-sounding grunts. Potter wondered if he, too, had been rented for the occasion.

  The Dean’s wife, Lucy, was a birdlike woman with tightly curled hair and a manner of fluttering sincerity that led her to grasp the hand of each guest in both of hers with a tight little squeeze of welcome. She was everywhere at once, moving at what seemed to be the speed of people in silent movies.

  Dean Hardy made a special point of introducing Potter to Professor Don R. Sample, who was Chairman of the Communications Department. Sample had earned his Ph.D. at the University of Illinois College of Communications, and had taught journalism all his life. He had written his thesis on automotive trade publications, and was regarded as one of the leading authorities in that field, having served as special consultant for what he referred to as “the Honda people,” in the area of publications.

  “I understand that you—uh—have had a good deal of experience on the practical—umm—side,” Sample said.

  “I was in public relations,” Potter answered.

  Sample, an extremely tall, gaunt fellow, leaned slightly downward to address Potter, rocking slightly as he spoke. “The Dean,” he said, “values the practical side very highly.”

  “Fortunately for me,” Potter smiled.

  “Indeed.”

  The edges of Sample’s mouth twitched in a movement that indicated something between a smile and a sneer. His long face looked remarkably grey. Potter had the feeling that if Sample coughed, dust would come out.

  The Gilpen faculty members at the party seemed a pretty motley crew, ranging from academic types like Sample to a longhaired young man whose background and expertise seemed even more “practical” than that of Potter. Buford explained that he was, by profession, a television repairman, as well as a Gilpen instructor.

  “What do you teach?” Potter asked.

  “Television repair.”

  “Where?”

  “At Gilpen. It’s a required course for all Communications majors.”

  Potter smiled, not knowing if Buford was putting him on, but the young man seemed completely sincere.

  “Dean Hardy feels,” he explained, “that if ‘The Medium is the Message,’ as McLuhan says, it’s important to know how our most significant medium of communications really works, from the inside out.”

  “Ingenious,” Potter said.

  Buford shrugged. “It follows.”

  “I suppose it does.”

  Potter went to get another drink.

  An amiable man with red hair and a bright pink face introduced himself as Gafferty, a fellow instructor in Communications. Perhaps because of his open smile, or because he asked the Harvard bartender if he’d mind just fixing him a glass full up with whiskey and a little ice, Potter took an instinctive liking to the guy, and asked him if faculty members as well as students were required to be experts in Television Repair.

  Gafferty laughed, his cheeks growing pinker. “Ah, would ya believe it now? The scholar of the future will carry a monkey wrench instead of a book.”

  “I take it McLuhan is pretty big around here.”

  “Rather a patron saint, I’d say.”

  A tall, graceful young woman drifted by and Gafferty hailed her, throwing an arm around her bony shoulders in a friendly, fatherly way, presenting her to Potter. “Would you believe this beautiful girl is a Scientist? A doctor of chemistry, that most occult study.”

  She gave Gafferty a peck on the cheek, and held a thin long hand toward Potter. “I’m Alison Farr,” she said.

  Gafferty went to get her the drink she had been on the way for, and Potter gave her a rudimentary résumé of himself. As he spoke, he felt almost hypnotized by her eyes. He usually didn’t notice women’s eyes. It was not that Alison Farr’s eyes were large and brown that engrossed him, it was the expression in them—a hurt look, as if someone had cruelly and unexpectedly rapped a ruler hard across her knuckles. Otherwise she seemed terribly calm and self-possessed.

  “I lived in New York a while myself,” she said. “When I was married.”

  “Oh?”

  “I’m not. Married anymore.”

  “Oh. Me, too—either.”

  It was a bond, like people who have just met discovering that they both were expelled from the same university, or both recently had their appendix removed.

  Two drinks later, when the party around them had reached a decibel of clinking and clattering sound that had them squinting in order to hear each other, Potter suggested they go out to dinner. Alison said if he didn’t mind potluck she’d like to just go back to her place and eat, she wanted to relax.

  Potluck turned out to be a wonderful coq au vin that Alison said was no trouble at all. She explained that she loved any excuse to cook well, it was kind of a hobby with her, took her mind off things, but she found it hard to do by herself.

  Potter nodded. “It’s like touch football,” he said.

  “Football?”

  “I mean, it turns your mind off. But you can’t do it alone.”

  “Oh. Yes.”

  Alison put on a record of Leontyne Price singing famous arias. It was lovely, but almost painfully intense. Like Alison. Potter found he was afraid of that right now. The intensity. He liked Alison Farr and he would like to go to bed with her, but he knew it would not be casual and amiable and safe. He did not want to have to look into those huge hurt eyes of hers afterward, did not want to be involved in their depths.

  It was the time when he would make his move with her now or not, and she knew that, and evidently knew his thoughts and doubts, and said, “I guess I’m very serious, right now. About things. And people.”

  “I know. And I guess I’m not. Not now, anyway. Or can’t be yet, or something.”

  “Good night,” she said.

  Potter stood up. “Thank you,” he said. “For the dinner. And everything.”

  She nodded, her eyes closed.

  “Good night,” Potter said.

  Potter had no special assignment for registration day at Gilp
en, but he thought he ought to show up. He scotch-taped a schedule of classes and office hours to his door, and then went down to the first floor where students were signing up for classes. It was crowded and a little confusing, and Potter just milled around aimlessly for a while, till he ran into Gafferty and asked if he’d like to go out for a beer.

  “Splendid suggestion,” Gafferty said.

  They walked down Beacon and across the Commons over to Jake Wirth’s, which Gafferty swore would be worth the walk. It was an old German place, one of the oldest restaurants in Boston, Gafferty said, and one of the few of any age where a man could still get an honest sandwich and a good draft beer. The place was large and plain, with bare wood tables, and Potter liked it. They each had a stein of dark.

  “You seemed to be hittin’ it off nice with lovely Alison,” Gafferty said. “At the party.”

  “Oh—sure. I mean, she’s a very nice person.”

  “Lovely girl. Been through a rough time, with divorce and all.”

  “I know.”

  “I was sort of hopin’, you and she—”

  “I don’t think so. I think we’re both too much in the same—uh—sort of condition. It’s hard to explain. I just got divorced myself recently.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. It must be a hard thing on a person.”

  “Yes. No matter how you cut it. You can’t make it light and easy. I take it you’re married?”

  “Married? Ah, that hardly covers it, man. Been married ten years, and I’ve got myself nine children. And the wife, of course.”

  “Nine?”

  “I can field my own baseball team.”

  “Jesus. Nine.”

  Potter felt a sense of awe at the enormity of it, and in one way an overwhelming relief that he had no such burden himself. But in another way it made him feel empty, one-dimensional, a dropout from the population explosion, an outsider from the great Dickensian family tradition. He had a fleeting sense of being in a contest with a man who was about his own age and in general his own profession, and the score was a lopsided 9–0 against him.

  “In a way,” he said, “I envy you—that big family.”

  “Ah, but don’t we all envy the next man? Me of course envying your carefree life, with lots of girls and no house deeds and diapers.”

  “Sure,” Potter grinned. “And I hope you know, of course, I’m sure, that my life is about as glamorous as yours. Falls as much short of the image, anyway.”

  The two men felt at ease with one another, and they drank and talked themselves into a state of camaraderie and boozy philosophizing that led Potter to ask his new friend what he “wanted out of life.”

  “Ah, I’ve been asked that a number of times. All I can answer is—and I really mean it—I’d just like to feel up to snuff.”

  They both broke out laughing, and Potter said, “If you can do that—feel up to snuff all the time, or most of the time, you’ve really accomplished something.”

  “Surely I believe that,” Gafferty said. “It’s more than I’ve ever got for very long. But Jesus, man—I don’t mean to complain. I love to teach, when I teach what I love, and I manage to do that most of the time. In spite of the requirements. I mainly teach the Irish poets. If that doesn’t count as the grandest ‘communications’ man has come up with, I’ll eat my hat. I teach that McLuhan fellow for a week or so, and then I get to the real Communications—Yeats, Joyce, Synge, O’Casey …”

  As Gafferty spoke enthusiastically of his teaching, Potter began to feel an excitement and apprehension about his own, about his upcoming classes, thinking if he was going to do it he damn well might as well do it right. He would read some more, prepare some more; he would give it his best, whatever that now was worth.

  4

  Potter felt he had prepared himself well for the first meeting of his seminar in Public Relations. He had thoroughly read and underlined Theory and Practice of Public Relations by Castorp and Billingsgate, which after considerable deliberation he had chosen as the principal text for the course. Furthermore, he had scoured the recent issues of the Public Relations Journal, a periodical of the PR trade, or, as the editors would probably prefer it, the profession. While actually working in the field his attention to that publication had been small, limited usually to occasions when he had nothing else to take with him to the bathroom for scanning while sitting on the pot. But now he felt it was part of his responsibility as a teacher to keep up with what was going on in his subject, have all the up-to-the-minute stuff at his command.

  He read with careful interest an article on “Public Relations in the Classroom,” which said that in most courses theory was being stressed over practice, and quoted Hunter P. McCarthy, head of the Public Relations “sequence” at West Virginia University, who felt that PR courses were being “absorbed into a more psychological-communicological approach.” Hunter P. McCarthy said further that “As man’s senses extend, the chief business of our society will be catering to those extended senses, and public relations practitioners should be in the vanguard of service to man’s extension.” After reading that declaration several times Potter was still not sure what exactly it meant, but it certainly gave him a heady feeling, knowing he was in the vanguard of something, however elusive. He was amused and reassured by an article on “PR People in Retirement,” which reported that “In-depth study finds them happy, involved, useful, and well-adjusted to a new way of life.” As one now allied with the business, if only as a teacher, Potter could surely look ahead to a contented time of pasturing in his declining years.

  Potter alluded to the article in his introductory remarks to the seminar, one of several notes of wry humor that he struck, hoping to set the tone in a breezy, informal way; and hoping also to win the hearts of each and every student. He was surprised at how important it seemed to him to be loved by his classes; his performance, casual as he hoped it appeared, was as studied and consciously timed as if he were on the stage, facing a first-night audience in the starring role of his career.

  Potter ended his spiel, lit a cigarette, and looked around the table for questions, confident he was prepared to field any and all. But the first one asked was the one he had not expected, was not in his notes or research or calculations, and he had not prepared any smooth way to handle it. It came zinging in from left field, though Potter was sure it had not been intended that way by the questioner, a clean-cut studious young man. Mr. Stevenson. Foster B. Stevenson.

  “Sir,” Mr. Stevenson asked, “you mentioned something of your own experience in the public relations field in New York City. Could you tell us, please, how it happened you decided to enter the field?”

  Potter could feel his cheeks growing warm. The faces of the fifteen students seated around the long mahogany table turned toward him, interested, attentive, expectant. Potter coughed. It sounded like a sudden explosion in the silence of the room. He began to speak, knowing he had to, groping awkwardly, hearing disjointed phrases come out, like “Well—you see—at that time—uh, I was—but first I should explain—”

  His groping for the manner in which to most suitably answer the question did not mean at all that he had forgotten it, or that it was the slightest bit unclear in his own mind, for as soon as the question was asked he saw with perfect clarity the actual time and place when he decided to go into public relations; it was one of those scenes that were indelibly retained in his memory because it marked so definite an end to one part of his life and the beginning of another, a demarcation as definitive as a wedding or funeral, a divorce or a graduation.

  Potter was standing in the middle of a room that tinkled with cocktail glasses and conversation. It was after he’d been kicked out by Tandy and had been living on a fold-out bed at the apartment of a guy from his old acting class, and waiting tables at Allen’s on the Upper East Side. Several friends stood amiably about, none of them noticing that the usually gregarious Potter had fallen silent for an untypical period of time, and that when he finally spoke, his comment did not s
eem related to the chit-chat around him.

  “I’m hungry,” he said.

  The three or four people standing by him stopped their own conversation and looked at Potter with curiosity.

  “Why, Phil,” one girl said helpfully, “there’s a whole ham and turkey right over there on the table. Would you like me to fix up a plate or a sandwich for you?”

  He shook his head, his expression fixed in a sort of trance. “That isn’t what I mean,” he said.

  “Well—uh—what is it—you’re hungry for?” the girl asked, warily now. “Steak or something?”

  “No,” he said, still evidently staring at something beyond or above the people who were now so attentively watching him; whatever he saw was beyond the party, the room, the evening.

  “We could fall over to Thompson Street and get some Italian food, if that’s what you want,” his roomie Al Solonkis said.

  “That isn’t what I want.”

  “Well for the love of Jesus, will you tell us what in the name of God you want?” Al burst out.

  Potter suddenly smiled, as if the trance was broken, and looked at his friends as if they should have understood all along what he meant that he was hungry for now, what he really wanted for the first time in his life.

  “Money,” he said.

  Once it happened it seemed only natural—all too natural, Potter thought—that he was just right for public relations. Going with Olney and Sheperdson, who handled a lot of theatrical clients, made it seem even more natural, an extension of his former interest. Shouldn’t he have known it all along?

  He had feared it all along.

  But that was not the sort of thing to tell the young people gathered in his brand new seminar; it did not convey the sort of image he wished to create for either himself or the subject. Whatever hostility or disrespect or condescension he felt about the field, he figured in part, at least, was due to the fact that it was not what he started out wanting to do at all, but a very distant second choice, not even in a sense a choice at all, but a seemingly inevitable solution, a half-baked bargain with a charming sort of devil. But if students were attracted to the sort of work and life that public relations offered, he saw nothing shameful about it, did not wish to discourage them, and hoped in fact to give them as much advice and good counsel, intellectual stimulation and accompanying entertainment as he possibly could.