And reminding Ray of the Navy and the young lieutenant. “Tuckwell,” he said; “did he get his Ph.D.? Confident he would, ‘goy-confident,’ you remember,” and the Doctor, gazing out over the stern as if at a sea of rolling years, went on with the rest of it—accounting, incidentally, for his presence on the ship (and, without meaning to, Ray’s also, as the ship became more and more a House of Mirrors reflecting himself at every turn, misshapen, grotesque, distorted beyond recognition—almost).
THE DOCTOR’S COLLEAGUE’S TALE
My colleague—I’ll call him “X”, Dr. X, you’d probably know him, high up in his field (the field, you might say, “digs” and all that)—he had his handsome wife Donna invite the two young people to dinner, had my wife and me, cooks and maids in those days, all very elegant in a modest way (Donna with money in the background, I believe), the newlyweds arriving hand-in-hand at the doorstep and disappointed, politely, at being separated at table, he between Donna and my wife and she, Meg, between X and myself.
All four of us older, but not by much—as we understood much—ten or fifteen years, maybe twenty. Anyway, a good bit farther along the road than Tuckwell, farther up the tricky ladder. His stint in the Navy set him back but it certainly wasn’t lost time for him because, on shore leave in some dim port he ran into an archeological troupe from some American university and fell in love with anthropology. Maybe a year or two somewhere else, I don’t remember. All kinds of credentials, smart, presentable enough in every way, and yet somehow a whisper of small-town. You could hardly spot it, maybe nobody else did. No sign they did. Or cared. The ladies obviously found him charming (“Sweet smile,” my wife said later—three times), Donna showing, it seemed to me, a glimmer of interest in how he viewed the twelve or so years between them—a much bigger span looking up from twenty-eight than down from forty.
And something of the same on our side of the table between young Mrs. Tuckwell—Meg, possibly twenty-three—and X and me, a much bigger span, maybe twenty-five or thirty years, enough to make us insist on “Tom” and “Norman” (no trouble about “Meg,” a daughter’s age if we had had one). X behaving like a boy walking on his hands before the new girl in town—talking about the Oedipus that the Thespians had staged the night before: “The good King just overreacted. He should have called in the Royal Shrink, who would have assured him every man wants to kill his father so he can marry his mother” (Meg smiling at her wedding ring as she tried to listen to our dated patter through wanting to hear what this Mrs. X was presuming to say to her husband). And tolerant of my own exhibitionism when I threw in my uncalled-for bit about “You seek and you find but what you find is not what you were seeking.”—A smallish fair-haired girl with the sort of unconscious self-confidence you get from a mixture of approvals in your backgouund, social and personal. Friends, yes; lovers no; would-be lovers, mille é tre. Truthful eyes; something in them my wife’s didn’t have, and certainly Donna’s didn’t, maybe something you naturally outgrow.
I remember glancing at X for his impression if his manner showed it. He seemed attentive to what she was saying but his old eyes had wandered to her throat and a chain of some sort round her neck with a pendant falling between her breasts, and I thought he is only half hearing her and I couldn’t blame him—breasts that might have been tailored to her measure and that she accepted and wore with the sort of unconscious satisfaction I used to feel in the days when I had my suits custom made not lifted from the rack and never quite right. I caught myself thinking they must have traveled with her Oscar boy-friend, nursed him on the high seas and brought him back to her safe and sound—and smiling.
As anybody knows, and certainly X and Donna had been out in the great world long enough to know, you are wasting your time to fall in love with someone, or even think you might, until the someone stops feeling deprived at being unable to hold the other-one’s hand beneath the table. Which I thought that evening might not be for some time. They weren’t exactly amateurs among the pros but the thought did occur to me the day my wife and I joined the gallery on donated tickets and followed a few holes of the U.S. Open not far away. I mean some amateurs are better than some pros, so there is no built-in disparagement in my thinking of Lieutenant and Mrs. Tuckwell—Oscar and Meg—as amateurs.
They found a small garage-apartment not far from the Graduate School, Donna and Meg found it, Lieutenant Oscar diving into his curriculum like a swimmer at a tournament hitting the roped-off lanes of the pool. We had them over one evening out of politeness, just the two of them (still holding hands, nourishing each other like Siamese twins), and they had us back after a time, just my wife and me. They spoke of Donna and X, casually. He did: “The Doctor runs a tight ship,” she quiet, smiling at her free hand.
And that was just about the end of it for us. A word about them now and then from X when our paths crossed and I asked. “Sharp. Top-quality work. You don’t tell him twice.”
“You think he’ll swing his Doctor’s,” not so much a question, which seemed already answered by his tone, but to keep him talking because he seemed through with it.
“If he doesn’t sprain something up here” (waving at his head). “I told him once to ease up, take his wife up to the Big City for a week. He said, ‘Later.’ I think Meg’s not too happy about it all. His wife, Meg.”
“Yes, I remember Meg. But he won’t let up?”
“He’s on to something he’s trying to prove for his dissertation, something about frogs and salt water. First thing I told him, of course, was keep it quiet, don’t tell anybody, not even your wife. I said, ‘There’re pirates on this ocean, Lieutenant,’ and he said, Yes, he knew. I think I know where he’s headed but I’m keeping out of it.”—I told him he was quite right.
I saw Tuckwell in the cafeteria one lunchtime, across the room, he didn’t see me. He was there with two young people. I suppose from the lab. Later when I looked again he was alone and I thought I would stop by and speak on my way out even though he was intent on jotting in a notebook—without glasses, prompting me to take mine off and wipe them on a paper napkin (very good for cleaning glasses). When I had them on and could see him again the situation at his table had changed considerably. He was talking across the notebook to Donna. Or listening, smiling a little, the smile. I had never seen her in the cafeteria before, though of course she had every right to be there if she wanted to, faculty wife, and probably there meeting X anyway; dressed very fittingly for a visit among us academic diners, ornaments (‘accessories,’ as they call them) held to a minimum, but still more decorative than the general run of our lady professors.
I thought he seemed rather impatient at being interrupted, tapping his pencil on the notebook page, one end then the other—but listening, attending, nodding, bringing up a smile, the smile. I left them; I had a graduate seminar coming up. The door was in another direction but I think I might have walked past their table without catching their eye, hers anyway. I thought X would be joining them any minute and I considered waiting outside to have a word with him, it had been weeks since I had seen him. Just as well I didn’t wait; he was at a symposium on the Coast, Berkeley, had connections at Berkeley, did his training there.
Not long after that I had a phone call from an old student of mine in Washington who had gone up the ladder to a very good thing on the staff of a highly respected scientific magazine (some Government tie-in, I don’t know what—neither here nor there). He said it looked as if they might be in the market one day soon for a young Ph.D. in Anthropology and if I knew of somebody there at the University to let him know. They had all kinds of applicants of course but a Doctor’s from Princeton would carry weight. They were putting in for a foundation grant that would cover most of the salary; he mentioned a figure but I’ve forgotten—except that I said I’d like to apply for the job, which made us both laugh.
Of course I thought of Tuckwell, though he was hardly in line for it with almost another year to go before he would meet the requirements; the opening migh
t well not exist by the time he got the doctorate. I hadn’t seen him all winter, in fact not since the moment with Donna in the cafeteria. We had asked him and Meg over to dinner once but they were busy and we dropped it; too many years between us anyway.
But one morning in spring I happened to meet X coming out of the Chemistry Building and we talked for a few minutes on the steps. He seemed in good shape but he surprised me by lighting a cigarette. He had given up smoking long ago; as I had too, shaking my head when he held out the pack. I asked about Tuckwell, mentioned the opening in Washington, or what had been an opening, possibly filled by then.
He knew about it. Tuckwell knew about it, had talked to him, wanted his advice on applying for it. “What was my frank opinion—as if I’d give any other kind—on his doctorate going through? Fair? Good? Excellent? It rather annoyed me, Norman; pushing me to some sort of commitment six months before he’d finished the disquisition. I told him it was the Board’s decision, not mine. He pressed me, not one to underestimate himself, you know. Asked if I would feel like backing him. I said that depended on the paper, and he said with his little sideways laugh, ‘It’s a good paper.’”
I asked if he had seen any of it and he said, A few parts. “Essentially, trying to show that tadpoles will grow from eggs whose nucleus has been replaced by the nucleus of an adult frog’s skin cell. Fair enough, if he can do it. And somebody else doesn’t do it first.—How’s your wife?”
Of course I said, Fine, and asked after Donna. It surprised me a little that he just nodded (though that was really adequate as response), stepped on his cigarette, said we must have lunch one day soon, he would call me (the ready-to-wear dismissal) and hurried off—a little testy, I thought, a little up-tight? Maybe not.
The first I heard of Tuckwell’s trip to the Washington people was in a note from my old student. They liked him; rather more than like him, were impressed. Tuckwell had mentioned me, and X of course, but said he had come down on his own; hadn’t consulted anybody. Face-to-face was best, he said. They could see him, and also he could see them—good-natured about it, easy, but meaning it too. He wanted to know about housing and my friend drove him round in his neighborhood. Tuckwell said there would be three of them, one about two feet long if they hired him in the fall. Very pleasant guy; they liked him. The Foundation had come through very handsomely with a grant, as my friend put it, “to defray costs 1 Ph.D. in Anthropology”; they were meeting in a week or so to go through the applications and make a choice.
My friend thought it would be a good idea if Tuckwell met “the Chief” (and “the Chief” met Tuckwell) but he was out of town until the next day. So Tuckwell spent the night, my friend put him up, Tuckwell phoning home to Meg, then phoning the lab and leaving word with Paula to tell Dr. X he would be absent the next morning but would be on hand early in the afternoon—confident, but conscientious too (and insisting on paying for the calls, nothing much, a dollar to two).
Then X gets the message and calls Donna from the lab that he will be detained at the office and not to hold dinner for him, he will get a snack at the cafeteria. And don’t wait up for him; he couldn’t tell how long this might go on. Then he calls Meg, asks to speak to Oscar, is told Oscar is in Washington, and asks Meg if he may stop in for a minute on his way home to leave some notes for Oscar. “But certainly. How thoughtful of you!” says little wife to husband’s boss.
And, “Certainly, oh what a nice idea!” when he finishes his drink and proposes “driving out for a bite” at a new place one of his people has told him of.
Incidentally, he laid all this before me later on the plane to Georgia, really upset and finding me, I suppose, perhaps the only one knowing everybody concerned. I listened, all ears as many little details fell into the blank spaces in what I already knew, or guessed. He wanted to talk, needed to, might have gone to a shrink if as a scientist he hadn’t been contemptuous. And he probably felt, too, that I would understand, sensing, I believe, my own down-the-years love—not quite love, of course, just a seedling—for the fresh, smooth-cheeked, quickly smiling Mrs. Tuckwell, Meg (a teetering smile, as if waiting).—But talking to me came later. Our paths didn’t usually cross.
It doesn’t take much imagination to see the attraction, Meg half his age (or less) wanting to please the boss to further husband’s career, rather flattered too by the old man’s attention to her as individual, possibly concerned in her own mind that her newly started pregnancy might spoil her appeal, not aware, I should say, that biology had more than taken care of that by toning her cheeks and hair and body the way a musician perfects the pitch of his violin before a recital. She could never have looked better.
For him there were other angles too, as he admitted later (hurrying over them). He had put this and that together and come out with Donna, turning forty, handsome as ever in his eyes, or more so, but wanting reassurance from someone besides him, wanting some fresher proof of her appeal than his fifteen-year-old attentions. Not the first time he had ticked off such guesses, her forays usually leading to jealousy on his part and after a while ending in renewed devotion (possibly supplemented by inherent surprises in the forays themselves), and back to forbearance and a not-intolerable makeshift ecstasy. He had even been half prepared to find she wasn’t home when he phoned from the lab, had gone to Washington with Tuckwell; ridiculous of course but jealousy paints with a nonobjective brush. He was not at all prepared, the next time Tuckwell’s name came up between them, to find she was indignant: “He is annoying me, this young man. Can you imagine!”
X making light of it with, “Well, after all, baby, you’re quite a temptation, you know.”
She said, Thank you, but she hadn’t descended to high-school dropouts yet, and he shouted, “Dropout!” and they both laughed—the clouds circling round and away.
He didn’t quite believe her; she was blowing up something insignificant, misinterpreting something. But he did believe there might have been something to blow up, to misinterpret, and it changed the way he felt about Meg, or not the way he felt but the way he might express it. If the boy had the nerve, the self-confidence, to “annoy” X’s wife then X would have the nerve to do the same to the boy’s (not that he hadn’t thought of it before—dreamed of it).
But of course it came to nothing, except that it created a sort of frosty coating over the mentor-student relationship with Tuckwell—husband and obstacle to X’s interest in Meg (which grew stronger against the impediment), and also an object of jealousy because of what X believed was Donna’s unconscious (or not unconscious?) attraction to the “dropout.”
Anyway, off again to the West Coast, taking Donna with him this time, and during the week he was away Tuckwell got the job, phoning me in his exuberance. They had just called him with the news: formal papers in the mail, sign, two witnesses, notary, return one copy, send photocopy of the dissertation registered mail as soon as confirmed.
Then he and Meg to Washington to find accomodations, finding something—McLean, I believe—taking it on a three-year lease for occupancy immediately after his appearance before the Board; back to the University and coming to my office, both of them, to thank me for my help, I trying to explain I had done nothing, but getting a bottle out of a bottom drawer and pouring us all a congratulatory glass. In another week he had turned in his dissertation, packed up and left; I stopped by their apartment as they were phoning for a taxi. When I offered to shake hands with Meg she flung her arms round my neck and kissed me on the mouth. I remember the feel of her lips.
Sarah-Wesley said, “You loved the woman yourself, you rascal,” the Doctor lifting his hand in a gesture that might have been a mild denial or just a signal he hadn’t finished yet, Ray mumbling something trivial while his thoughts adjusted not so much to the doctor’s being in love with Meg, obvious enough, but to the possibility the doctor and “colleague” were one and the same—the mate with elastic strides tailored to fit the movement of the deck like a circus performer on his bouncing wire, ignoring the
passengers as usual (as if it were Rule One in his Service Manual), taking the companionway up to the bridge two steps at a time, the cat trailing like a dinghy. In love with Meg at the time and thought he still was, the idea giving Ray a shock of recognition like passing someone on the street who reminds you of someone else, of yourself indeed, yourself distorted in the Fun-House mirror; of himself being in love with Claudia once and thinking he still was, her voice coming through her letters, “They mowed the wheat below us yesterday, what a glorious smell!”—The Doctor clarifying his lifted hand with, “That’s not quite all of it.”
(THE DOCTOR’S COLLEAGUE’S TALE—CONCL.)
The baby was born, a boy, in McLean a week after they settled in, the move itself, new friends, new surroundings and all that helping to bring it on I’d say, let the gynecologists smile. Everything fine, except certification hadn’t come through; he had taken the two five-hour finals and the two-hour oral, handed in his dissertation and was ready to come up any day at X’s notification for the final public oral. After another week he wrote X a polite note: he didn’t want to seem impatient, he knew such things took time, but the people down there had asked him again and it was a little embarrassing. They had taken him on the strength of it and were getting a little uneasy.
When he got no answer in ten days he told Meg he was going up there and try to hurry it up. She suggested phoning Dr. X; “So much easier, honey. And cheaper!” He said, Seeing his face was as important as hearing his voice; nevertheless he phoned.
But Dr. X was “not in the office this morning.” “Is this Paula?”
“Yes it is, Dr. Tuckwell.”
“Paula, please ask him to call me tonight after six,” looking down at their new number and giving it to her. She said she was sorry but they didn’t expect him back until Monday, he was on the West Coast. “Well, ask him to call me as soon as he gets back. Important, Paula.”
The Bookman's Tale Page 5