“That suits me fine, sir.”
“Now then,” the professor said. “ ‘The Signal Elm,’ a novel by David Grubb …”
Leafing through the pages, Professor Dudley had quickly grasped the outlines of the shopworn plot. It told the story of a young man’s struggle to maturity and identity, starting from the confines of an immigrant Jewish family in Brooklyn. (Was Grubb Jewish? It seemed likely.) A family whose roots were in the Old World, baffled by the New. The story progressed until the young man was at last able to feel wholly a part of it, able to conquer it and, as well, to transcend the shadowing mediocrity of his background. At the climax the boy arose in a brand-new suit to deliver the Valedictorian Address at PHS 53 while his parents listened with gentle awe to his mastery of a language they had never really learned. The book ended in a subdued tone with the young man arriving at a green and only-dreamed-of campus, with possibilities for a bright new future ringing his head like a saint’s halo of real gold. There were sections and occasional isolated scenes which were beautifully written. Sometimes the young stammer to the very edge of poetry almost in spite of themselves. Professor Dudley had not the slightest notion why this opus was called “The Signal Elm.” Doubtless something had eluded him. He confined his brief critique to purely technical faults: stiff dialogue, overwritten description, crude symbolism, lack of clear-cut motivation for action, absence of well-defined development of what appeared to be the minor themes. On the whole the book itself and this present interview were precisely the material for the kind of anecdote Professor Dudley could tell so well, with mild self-deprecating irony, at a faculty party.
“I hope I haven’t been too rough on you,” he said, sneaking a quick look at his watch that he hoped did not go unnoticed. “I’m aware this effort means a good deal to you.”
“Yes, sir. It means a lot.”
“It should,” the professor continued. “It’s quite an accomplishment, particularly for a student who is not an English major. There are not many students around here who could write a better book than that.”
“Thanks. I’ve been so close to it for so long—”
“Maybe that’s the whole trouble. Maybe you’re still too close to the material at this time. Why not let it sit a while? Why not try your hand at some other theme, some entirely different kind of story, something that will let you keep a little more aesthetic distance?”
“Don’t you think I could revise? I mean, with your criticism as a guide—”
“No, Mr. Grubb, I don’t. To tell you the truth, I don’t think there’s any hope at all for this one. You asked me for the truth. Remember, though, this is only my opinion. I feel that there is nothing you nor I nor anyone else could do to salvage this story. It would take a genius of another stamp—a modern Dickens, say.”
“Yes, sir,” the boy said.
“I can see you’re disappointed. Don’t be. You’re young. Ever so much younger than you realize now. And you have written a novel. Even if it’s not a good one, it’s an achievement. Even if you never write another line as long as you live, you have done this much.”
“I put everything I’ve got into this book,” the boy said.
“Don’t—I repeat—by all means don’t take my criticism as gospel. Show it to somebody else on the faculty.”
“I don’t think that will be necessary. Everybody knows you’re the best critic in school.”
“The best critic in school? That isn’t quite accurate,” the professor said, handing him the manuscript and walking him toward the door. “But I suppose it is the little white lies, the happy little self-delusions that we all cling to and live by. I’m glad you sent the manuscript to me to read. Otherwise we might never had met. Perhaps we’ll meet again. Do you play squash?”
“No, sir. I lift weights for exercise.”
“Well, something will turn up,” the professor said, offering his hand. “When you go out, please tell the young lady who’s waiting in the hall to come right in. And, Grubb, don’t give up. I’d like to think I’ll see the day when I’ll open a package in the mail and find an autographed copy of your first novel—perhaps even this one.”
David Grubb looked at him, shrugged eloquently, and departed, closing the door softly behind him.
When the door closed, the professor walked over to his windows. He saw Grubb appear, ambling head-down along the crisscross walk and, particularly, he noticed an intriguing squirrel who paused in alarm by a tree near the walk, its paws poised together in an attitude of prayer, its great soft tail cocked in a question mark. He heard the door open and close behind him.
“Miss Palmer,” he said, waving her to the chair, “I’m sorry I had to keep you waiting.”
“You’ve always been so good about giving me time,” she said. “I can’t complain.”
She sat easily in the chair, her fine tanned legs demurely crossed. She was blond and full-bodied as a ripe pear and her eyes were as clear and cool as rainwater. He gave her a cigarette and a light and moved behind his desk. He ruffled the papers in the top drawer and came up with a manuscript bearing the title “My Picture Left in Scotland: A Study of Ben Jonson,” beneath which was typed “Submitted as Spring Term Junior Paper to the Department of English by Jenny Bell Palmer.” He examined the wide-margined, beautifully typed pages, studiously frowning. He was aware that Jenny Bell Palmer had now shifted her position. She was sitting on the edge of her chair.
“With regard to your term paper,” he said, “I think I’d better read my comments first.”
He glanced at her. She wet her lips and nodded.
“This paper is a lucidly written close and comprehensive study of a single poem by Ben Jonson, and, within these self-imposed limitations, you have succeeded admirably. The reader is not entirely convinced that this eighteen-line lyric is deserving of such intense scrutiny or that the poem is as representative of Jonson’s work as a whole as the writer seems to assume. This reader, not himself a specialist in the Renaissance period, would like to be led and encouraged by some cogent evidence to accept the validity of the implied assumption. On the whole, however, in spite of certain minor mechanical errors, this paper is an adequate realization of its intentions. A-minus.”
“Thanks,” Jenny Bell said. “Thanks a lot.”
“Really, it wasn’t so bad at all,” he said. “You seem to be improving all the time.”
“I liked doing this one,” she said. “It’s much easier to write about something you really care about.”
“I am curious about one thing—why this particular poem happened to catch your fancy.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I guess because it’s such a personal kind of a poem. I mean, you take something like ‘Drink to Me Only With Thine Eyes.’ That could have been written to almost anybody. In this one he seemed to have a particular person in mind. There was Ben Jonson in love with this young girl and he was worried because he was afraid she wouldn’t love him. I thought maybe it would be more interesting if I wrote about it from the feminine angle.”
“That’s an interesting idea,” the professor said. “I’m not sure it’s clear in your paper, though.”
“Oh the paper!” she said. “That’s the whole trouble. As soon as I start writing a paper I—I don’t know—I freeze up. An academic paper is such an impersonal thing!”
She had relaxed again, recrossing her marvelous young legs, and it occurred to him that at any moment all her youth and vitality might burst the shell of the skirt and cashmere sweater leaving her as nude and shining as an apple.
“Excuse me, did you say something?”
“Nothing, Miss Palmer, nothing at all. My imagination was simply wandering toward the riotous precincts of senility. Why don’t we take a look at the poem together and see what you were really trying to do in the paper?”
He went to the bookcase, fumbled vague-handed for a moment, then returned with an anthology of Elizabethan and Jacobean verse. A quick flipping of pages and he found the poem. He presen
ted the book to her and stood close behind her chair, close enough to detect the sweet fresh odor of soap. She must have showered just before coming to keep the appointment. Jenny Bell Palmer studied the poem silently.
“It’s the last part especially,” she said. “I mean, in the first part he just kind of states the facts of the situation. He says he is in love with her and she doesn’t seem to love him.”
“What about the last part?”
“Don’t you see? I mean, it seems kind of self-evident to me.”
“Suppose I read it aloud,” he said.
He leaned over her shoulder, his hands gripping the chair, and in a soft voice, still haunted by the dim ghost of an acquired Oxford accent, he read:
“Oh, but my conscious feares
That flie my thoughts betweene
Tell me that she hath seene
My hundreds of gray haires
Told seven and fortie yeares.
Read so much wast, as she cannot embrace,
My mountaine belly, and my rockie face,
And all these through her eyes, have stopt her eares.”
“It sounds very nice when you read it like that.”
“But what about the last part? It seems to me that the poet is only being realistic. After all, he is forty-seven years old, gray-haired, fat, and, as Time would say, craggy.”
“That’s exactly what I mean!” she exclaimed. “You notice he doesn’t say word one about what the girl thinks. He’s just being sorry for himself.”
“Indeed he doesn’t. How could he put her real thoughts in the poem? What man, since poor old Adam woke up and found Eve sleeping beside him, has ever known what the girl really thinks?”
“That’s the trouble with men,” Jenny Bell said. “Even the intelligent ones.”
“I’m afraid the defect is irremediable.”
“No, it isn’t! Men just won’t use common sense. Look how silly it is. There was Ben Jonson, a very great poet, all worried about what some silly girl was thinking about him.”
“Otherwise no poem,” Professor Dudley said. “It’s just as well.”
“I can’t believe it.”
“Let’s face it,” he said. “He does admit to a few physical characteristics that might be called impediments.”
“When a girl falls in love with an older man, that part doesn’t even enter into it.”
“That’s a very sweet thought.”
Without moving an inch he could have bitten into Jenny Bell Palmer’s pink, small, exposed ear. He turned away and lit a cigarette.
“It isn’t just a ‘sweet thought,’ ” she said. “Look, I have perfectly normal reactions to almost everything. Now my daddy, for example, he’s ugly as sin, and I could easily fall in love with a man like him.”
“And your point is that Ben Jonson was really a lovable old guy. Like Daddy.”
“You make it all sound so silly when you put it that way.”
“Ah!” he said, standing once again in strict profile by the windows. “What a good world it would be if all the illusions of the young and fair—”
“But it is a good world,” she said. “Don’t you think?”
Professor Dudley felt his lips relaxing into a slow smile. He returned to his desk, sprawled leisurely and unofficial on the edge of it, his long legs dangling, exposing below the creased line of his khaki trousers the neat loafers he wore, the subdued argyle socks, and the tan bulge of an athletic, tennis-playing calf. He looked a good deal younger than forty.
“I don’t know why you do it,” he said. “Every time we have an appointment you come in here, immaculate, bursting with youth and life. And you make me feel the weight of each and every one of my years, the burden of time I have to push around like the rock of Sisyphus. You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”
“I never know how to take you,” she said. “You’re always teasing and kidding around.”
“I’m not just kidding around.”
“You don’t look a day over thirty and you know it.”
“And you—today you look as if you had just stepped out of a Renoir canvas.”
“You ought to be ashamed.”
“What on earth is the matter with Renoir?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “His women are all so—sensuous.”
“There you go again,” he said. “Passing judgment on the basis of preconceived values. How am I ever going to make a critic out of you?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” she said, frowning.
“Take a word like that, like sensuous. The way you say it—sensuous—implies that it’s some kind of a naughty word. Sensuous is a perfectly respectable neutral adjective and you know it.”
“All right,” she said. “But you know what I mean.”
“Yes,” he said. “I know what you mean.”
He looked into her eyes. They were like water on a windless day, unclouded by complexity. If there was any emotion to be read in her eyes, it was only a mild, very mild anxiety. Perhaps it was only curiosity.
“Let’s pursue the point,” he said. “You find Renoir sensuous in some way that has connotations of naughtiness. Why?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” she said a little petulantly. “I just do, that’s all.”
“All right. Let me tell you how I feel about Renoir,” he said, suddenly exuberant, theatrical. “I think Renoir is Paris in the spring, the sweetest, ripest, greenest city of April in the world. A long time ago I lived on the Left Bank, seeing everything for the first time with wide, intoxicated eyes. Drinking in every conceivable impression and experience like wine. Jotting down wild, irresponsible, inspired ideas for poems and stories and novels and plays. Somehow Renoir symbolizes all that to me, the lifeblood of youth, the time when every girl in Paris seemed to be a living still life made up of all the sweet fruits of the earth. And all of it lost, gone—”
“Oh well,” she said. “You were being an artist. Artists are different.”
“In what way? How are artists different?”
“You know what I mean,” she said. “Like when I used to go to life class over at the Art Department. It was a mixed class, but once you got used to the idea of the nude model being up there, it was all right. Everybody just concentrated on their drawing. All except a couple of football players who signed up for the course and couldn’t draw a straight line. They sat in the back and giggled.”
“There are always football players who sit in the back and giggle. We have to try to ignore them.”
“Oh, I ignored them all right. And, you know, one of them actually had the nerve to ask me for a date. Would you believe it?”
“Your point is well taken. I would believe it and artists are different.”
But she had looked away from him, smoothed her skirt, and gathered up her books. And now she was standing. He thought he detected the faintest stain of a blush on her cheeks.
“I still don’t like Renoir,” she said. “I guess men do, though.”
“I wish we had the time to discover why you really don’t respond to Renoir,” he said. “Perhaps another time. As it is the light is waning, it’s already past five o’clock, and I must totter home.”
“Christ!” she said. “I’m late for choir practice.”
She started for the door in a rush.
“Hey, Jenny Bell,” he called after her. “You forgot your paper.”
Collecting herself, she returned and gracefully accepted the paper from him.
“I hope you will feel free to drop in anytime during the rest of the term to discuss your work.”
“Don’t you worry,” she said. “I will.”
She went out of the door, closing it gently behind her. He could hear her quick feet in the hall and, looking out of the window, he saw her racing across the quadrangle, scattering poor astounded squirrels every which way, her skirt blowing, her legs flashing. Diana, the huntress, without a thought in her head, and he was Actaeon, gnawed to pieces and devoured by his own hounds. He bit dow
n on his lip until he could taste the light salt flavor of blood.
Professor Dudley walked home the back way, avoiding the main street of the town with all its little bustle of rush-hour traffic and late shopping. It was always better to be walking along the tree-lined, residential streets with their well-kept lawns and well-painted houses. It took a little longer, but it was only a few blocks either way. And he had come to think that walking easily in the green shade was a kind of ritual. He felt that coming home from the college he was like a deep-sea diver rising slowly from an arena of dark, dreaming beauty into the pitiless glare of sunlight and burning air.
When he opened the front door of the house, Ronnie stood formidably barring his way, arms akimbo.
“Susie broke my bicycle,” he announced. “Mama is sick and we’re hungry.”
“Well, now,” Professor Dudley said. “We’ll have to see about these things, one at a time.”
“I should hope so,” Ronnie cried over his shoulder, fleeing.
The professor set down his briefcase and looked at himself in the hall mirror. Not quite like Dorian Gray. But somehow remarkably lucky, remarkably free from the lines of either his years or his sins. He adjusted his necktie and climbed the stairs to the bedroom. He knocked and entered, finding the blinds drawn and finding Vivian stretched out on the bed, her thin, pretty, troubled face buoyed up by pillows, etched with the pains of a headache.
“You know,” she said, “it’s not much help even if you know it’s psychosomatic.”
“No, I guess it hurts just as much.”
“Regular soap-opera day here,” she said. “First the goddamn dishwasher broke down right after breakfast and then I couldn’t get the car started. I think it’s the battery. I don’t know what’s the matter with it. Maybe it just won’t work for me. One goddamn thing after another all day long. And then to top it all, Susie got the most awful gash in her head and had to have stitches. She was trying to ride Ronnie’s bike down the steps at the park.”
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