The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2

by Donald Harington

  Weekdays, when Kenny was in school (at Schenley Junior High, where he was in the seventh grade) and when Professor Ogden, who had apparently been required to cancel the remainder of his classes for the term, came knocking at your door, you had a series of intensive private lessons in English grammar. Many years before, when he was a mere assistant professor and overworked, Knox Ogden had “moonlighted” by teaching evening classes in Fundamentals of English for Foreign Students, of which there were thousands in this city, and he could regale you with stories of malapropisms, blunders, and solecisms committed in the speech and writing of his students that made your own mistakes seem trivial and not ludicrous. Ogden always began each session by bringing you a generous tumbler of Stolichnaya (although by this time you’d acquired your own bottle of less expensive Popov, as well as some County Fair bourbon to offer him in return) and then asking you, “Have you had a chance to sneak a glance at my poems?” In truth, you’d sneaked more than a glance at them, you’d applied your dictionary substantially to them, from the opening piece, “The Yearning,” to the concluding and terminal, “Again, the Dance,” but Knox Ogden’s late (and last) poems, as his critics have since pointed out, verged on the mystical, the metaphysical, the entranced; as if, wrote the critic Lawrence Brace, “he attained not an ultimate serenity but a dark and hesitant glimpse of some grandiose and terrible truth,” and you were never able to tell him what you honestly thought, or were unable to feel, about his poems.

  One day (or not any day at all) when Loretta was picking you up to give you a ride to the supermarket (an experience that, in contrast to your market shopping in Georgia or Russia, was so fabulous that I’ve got time to mention only the most fantastic difference: that you had to wait in line for only five minutes), she remarked, “He sure has got a powerful crush on you!” and you replied, “Yes, he certainly has. But he writes such strange poetry.”

  She looked at you strangely and then said, “Oh, I didn’t mean him! I meant Kenny.”

  Chapter nine

  Your crash course in English lasted only six days, albeit every day for two hours or more, and on the seventh day two things interrupted it: Professor Ogden was simply too weak to get out of his murphybed and meet you, and you had appointments to be interviewed at the university. The night before, Loretta reminded you that Dr. Elmore had reminded her to remind you, since you obviously found the whole thought terrifying and were seeking to forget it. Loretta urged you to help yourself to her wardrobe, and she gave her advice on picking out a smart dress and shoes for the interview, and which jewelry was most tasteful, and she even tried to persuade you to wear one of her blond wigs—but you declined, accepting instead the loan of a bright Paisley silk scarf to replace the black cotton one. “Well,” she observed encouragingly, at the end of your dressing session, “You sure have caught on fast! Your talk and all, I mean.”

  But perhaps not fast enough to land you a job that required good English. Your first interview was early in the morning in the Cathedral of Learning with Dr. Hector Schvann of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literature. Professor Schvann, whose Ph.D. was from prestigious Berkeley, first exchanged polite chitchat with you in Russian. How did you like America so far? Which part of town were you living in? Did you miss Leningrad? In which politicals’ camp were you interned? Really? A terrible reputation, that place. And obviously they have depilated you, Yekaterina Vladimirovna. But an attractive scarf. Professor Schvann spoke excellent Russian, with an American accent, and while it was good for you to listen comfortably to someone whose every word you understood, his language reminded you of people you wanted to forget.

  He opened a folder and switched abruptly from Russian to English, and pointed out that according to your curriculum vitae your advanced degrees were apparently in botany, not in languages, and did you feel qualified to be teaching elementary Russian to young Americans? Certainly, you said, with synthetic bluster. Well, perhaps, Yekaterina Vladimirovna, he said; and as a matter of fact there was an opening for a teacher of two sections of Intro, but it also required teaching a literature course, in English: The Comic Spirit in Russian Literature. Think you could handle that? No problem, you said. Which writers and works would you include? he wanted to know. Well, you said, I would start with Gogol, of course, his Dead Souls. And I’d probably want to include Dostoyevski’s Idiot, because he saw Prince Myshkin as somewhat like Don Quixote, did he not? Yes, but, Yekaterina Vladimirovna, he said, but what else? Let me think, you said: And yes, something by Turgenev, because it was Turgenev who said, “Whom you laugh at you forgive and are ready to love.” You had always liked that line. Whom you laugh at you forgive and are ready to love. The professor nodded and wrote something down; perhaps he was writing this quotation. Finally he asked you, But wouldn’t you include something by Nabokov? Alas, sweet Kat, you didn’t yet know the man’s work (it would be a gift on a saint’s day, a favorite American saint, Valentine, when someone would give you your first novel by V.N.), but you knew enough to say:

  “No. Is not his funny stuff written in English, not Russian?”

  Professor Schvann laughed and agreed, but he said that, quite frankly, he didn’t think they could use you. There were other applicants for the position, some with Ph.D.’s in Russian from prestigious American schools like Berkeley. Thank you for your interest, however, Yekaterina Vladimirovna, and thank you for dropping by to chat. Give my regards to Professor Elmore.

  I was tempted for a moment to punish the guy, to afflict him with something, ideally some disease with a Russian name, but he was only doing his job, after all, and he wasn’t unkind to you. I let him alone.

  For your second interview, you were required to enter a building elsewhere on the campus, away from the Cathedral of Learning, a drab and forbidding building that unfortunately reminded you very precisely of the Serbsky Institute in Moscow, that infamous psychiatric hospital where you first fell into the snares and pillories of Dr. Bolshakov and were saved from utter madness by the boy Dzhordzha. Your knees failed you, and you were able to force yourself up the steps and into the building only by concentrating upon your awareness that there were not two swinish KGB men holding you by either arm. You were unescorted. You were free. If this Dr. Dalrymple turned out to be wearing a trench coat, you could simply turn around and run, and nobody would stop you.

  But Leonard Dalrymple was (and is) a very nice guy. He offered you coffee and a doughnut, and he told you to smoke if you wanted to (you did), and he put you completely at ease. “Ken’s told me where you came from,” he said, “and why you have to wear that scarf. No doubt, you’ll have your own hair grown back in before we know it, right? No problem.” He opened his folder and made some appreciative murmurs, like a gourmet settling down to a feast. “Hey, did you know I saw your paper on the mutant spores of the phallales last year in the summer issue of Mycotaxon? I read the English translation, of course. Also your paper on the Geastrum fornicatum in the recent Mycologia. Very impressive stuff.”

  You assumed he was being polite, that he had seen the articles mentioned in your curriculum vitae, that he had not actually read them. But it was nice of him, all the same. You smiled modestly and said, simply, “Thank you.”

  “You’ve been stateside how long now?” he asked.

  Alas, Knox Ogden had not taught you stateside, but he had taught you how to show ignorance gracefully. “I am sorry,” you said, laughing, “but I haven’t been here long enough to learn the word stateside.”

  Len Dalrymple laughed. “Well, that’s not very long at all!” he said.

  “I expect you’ll have to learn a lot of words. But you already know the scientific terminology pretty well, don’t you? And that’s what counts.” Then he told you that Bill Turner, their mycologist, had received a sudden call to London for a six-week symposium and thus had been required to take an unexpected “off-campus duty assignment” for the winter term. He winked at you and said, “Lucky for you.” Filling in for Turner would require teaching two sec
tions of Intro Bot, plus the Intro Mike. Think you could handle it? Certainly, you said, without having to manufacture any bluster.

  “What text d’you think you’d want to use for the Intro Mike?” he wanted to know.

  It was a test question, not conversational, a key part of your interview, but you were ready for it, thanks to Anangka and that previous morning in the campus bookstore. Correctly you guessed that “Intro Mike” was campus slang, and you said, “I’d like to use, if I may, Deacon’s Introduction to Modern Mycology.”

  “Lucky for you!” he said, beaming. “That’s what Turner has already ordered for next term, so you won’t have any problems with the bookstore.”

  “Excellent,” you said, smiling with approval.

  “Of course, you understand, the appointment’s only for the one term, January through April, while Turner’s away?”

  “Good enough.” You smiled again.

  He stood up and offered you his hand, and even though you hadn’t known him for two hours yet, you permitted yourself to take it. “Well, glad to have you aboard, Katherine. First classes are January eighth. Marilyn will show you—you met Marilyn, our secretary, out there—she’ll show you where your office is and give you the university faculty packet and stuff. Merry Christmas.”

  Knox Ogden hadn’t taught you that expression, but it sounded familiar enough for you to repeat it, “Merry Christmas to you, Dr. Dalrymple.”

  “Please,” he said, “just call me Len.” And there, on the spot, I made three of his wishes start coming true: I arranged for his promotion from associate professor to full professor to be cleared through the dean’s office that very afternoon, I made airplane reservations for his daughter to fly home from the West Coast for the holidays, and I nudged the editors of Cytologia into accepting for publication his article “Mitotic Chromosome Pairing in Allopolypoids of the Atylosia.” The next time you saw him, Len Dalrymple would be a most happy fellow.

  Chapter ten

  In frozen Svanetia, December 25 is just another winter’s day. Not that Svanetians permitted their Russian rulers to make them into atheists, but traditionally they follow the Julian calendar of the orthodox Church, whereby Christmas, Shob, is celebrated on January 6. Even in my part of America, the middle mountains, the old folks used to observe the same distinction between “New Christmas” and “Old Christmas.” (See my poem “Presents. Presence.”: The day the “younguns” think to gift / Is on December twenty-fifth. / The oldsters feel that they should mix / The day of January six.) Anyhow, when you responded to the knock on your door that Tuesday morning and found Kenny standing there with a big smile and bright eyes and a package done up in shiny red wrap and bow, you thought at first that he had simply “snitched” for you one more item, as he was always doing, except that never before had he bothered to gift wrap any of his snitchings.

  “Come in,” you invited. “What is this?”

  “Merry Christmas!” he said. Taking the package, you thought that his greeting was simply, like Len Dalrymple’s, in advance of the occasion, but you realized that, unless America had drastically different customs, one would present the gift on the day. “Go ahead, open it,” he urged you. And you sat down to open it, almost dreading to find that perhaps thoughtful Kenny had bought you a wig of real brown hair. But the box was too heavy to contain only hair. Slowly, taking care not to rip the paper, you undid the ribbon and Scotch tape and opened the package. It was a small radio. Plastic and black-brown, two knobs and one switch, capable of being switched from AM to FM. “Now you can, like, grab some sounds,” he said, and took it and plugged it in, and fiddled with the dial until he found a station playing some heavy rock. “Or do you want some longhair?” he said, and began twisting the tuner again. On the job, I arranged for WQED to come in, playing Tchaikovsky, my little Christmas gift for you. “How’s that?” Kenny asked.

  “Oh, wonderful!” you said. “Thanks so much, but I do not have Christmas present for you yet.”

  “You didn’t have to get me anything,” he said. “I know you don’t have any money.”

  “But I must give you something, when Christmas comes.”

  “Huh? Today’s Christmas,” he declared.

  “It is?”

  “Sure. We’ve already unwrapped all our stuff downstairs, and Mom and Dad are already bombed on eggnog and, like, out of it, and I’m trying to fix a turkey in the oven. You know anything about cooking turkeys?”

  You were in confusion, not from his language. You had an idea what bombed meant, and you could guess what eggnog was, and you’d seen turkey recipes in that Ladies Home Journal, so you resisted your impulse to fetch your paperback dictionary, which was falling apart by now anyway. Nor were you confused by his question “Do you want some longhair?” realizing it likely had nothing to do with a wig. You were perplexed to find that Christmas had somehow arrived twelve days before you’d expected it, and you were distressed that you were unprepared to return the favor of Kenny’s gift. Indeed, you had spent some time thinking about possible presents for him—an astronomy book, perhaps, or a nice shirt, or even a subscription to his favorite magazine, Playboy—but you had concluded that the very finest present you could give him, knowing him as you did, knowing what he might most appreciate, would be to divest him of his bothersome virginity. Now, closing your eyes to the magnificent sound of WQED’s (or my) Tchaikovsky, you thought about that: You didn’t have time to plan it, to get up your courage, to learn the right words to offer it, to make it happen. It was too soon, Christmas. Give you twelve more days and you could do it, but not now.

  When you said nothing, he waited for a time, and then he tried again, “Can you do it?”

  Lost in thought, you snapped back to this world, and asked, “Do which?”

  “Help me cook the turkey.”

  “Oh, sure, I could try,” you offered, and you rose to your feet and cast a wistful look at your unmade murphybed.

  “First I’ve got to see if your neighbors want to help eat it. Mom says we should invite Dr. Koeppe and the Jerk. You know if they’re in?”

  You shook your head. You hadn’t heard any movements in the adjacent apartments. During the more than two weeks you’d been here, you’d only seen Edith Koeppe on a couple of occasions, and you’d scarcely exchanged words with her: an overweight woman, early forties, perhaps, stringy short blonde hair; she seemed to spend very little time in her apartment, coming home late, leaving early. For a sociologist, she was very unsociable. As for Knox Ogden…You hadn’t seen him since the last time he’d given you a lesson in English, when he had been in such poor condition he hadn’t been able to rise from his sofa and had begged you to make a drink for him, which you had refused to do. Now you realized that you had intended to give him something for Christmas, too, and had been caught unprepared. You hoped he wouldn’t have a gift for you.

  “I’ll knock and see,” Kenny said, and left your apartment. You made up the murphybed and lifted it, folding it up into its compartment in the wall, listening to the sounds of knocking, first on one side of you, then the other. After a while Kenny returned, his demonstrative face furrowed into a frown. “Neither one of ’em’s home.” He made a variety of puzzled expressions. “Maybe they, like, went off somewhere together for Christmas.” He screwed up his brow. “But they’re not even on speaking terms with each other anymore.” He spent some moments in thought. “Probably she went to visit her sister,” he determined, “and I guess he’s maybe just gone and finally croaked at last.”

  “‘Croaked’?” You didn’t know that one.

  “You know, kicked the bucket, bought the farm.”

  You didn’t know those, either, but you had an uncomfortable approximation of a guess. “Talk straight, Kenny,” you requested.

  “Gone west,” he tried, nervously, although he’d started out jokingly—unable, like all the inventors of all the hundred and one euphemisms and euphuisms for the condition, to come right out and say a word so final, so irrevocable, like the
last word in the last sentence on the last page of a novel.

  But his use of one of my favorite ways of putting it (because in truth that’s precisely what I’ve, what we’ve all, done, turned our puny corporeal locomotions in the direction of the setting sun in order to accept the eternal weightless omnidirection that is our lot) roused me out of my half-listening state and made me take a quick, determined jaunt into the next room, where, sure enough, I found Knox Ogden’s extract trying to learn how to exist without gravity.

  “For crying out loud,” Ogden declared in exasperation, striving to give some dignity and uprightness to his topsy-turvy levitation, “where are the handholds?”

  “There are no handholds, Og,” I told him. “Try not to hunt for them and you won’t miss them.”

  He stared at me, and ceased his undulations. “Who are you?” he demanded. “Not the devil, I hope.”

  “No, Og, just a poor defunct transient like yourself,” I said. “Dan Montross was my earthly name.”

  “Not Daniel Lyam Montross the poet?” he said.

  I was moved, and more than touched, that he’d heard of me, possibly even knew my work. “At your service, forever,” I said.