The Realm of Last Chances

by Steve Yarbrough

  He quit talking, which she took as indication that the time had come to move beyond narrative into analysis and perhaps even criticism. “Why did you do it?” she asked.

  “For the most predictable of reasons. I was snorting a ton of coke, and that’s not cheap. Plus, a lot of writers come through that store, including some huge names, and quite a few of them were willing to hang out late and get blasted. I tried too hard to impress them. I wanted to be what they were.”

  “To be a writer?”

  “Sure. Didn’t you?”

  “No. Never.”

  He shook his head as if he didn’t believe her. “I thought almost everybody doing a Ph.D. in literature wanted to be one, that you all had two or three novels or a stack of poems secreted away in your desks.”

  “I don’t have anything like that in my desk.”

  “Amazing,” he said. “No secrets.”

  “I didn’t say I don’t have secrets,” she said, then immediately regretted it, since this was an invitation for him to ask what they were.

  It surprised her when he didn’t, and even more so that she felt offended by his failure to ask, as if he considered it a given that her secrets, whatever they might be, were less worthy of discussion than his own.

  When Matt stopped in front of her house, he saw her husband sitting in a lawn chair on the patio, having a drink while the black Lab snoozed at his feet. A charcoal grill stood nearby, smoke rising from the grate.

  “Here,” she said, “let me introduce you to Cal.”

  He protested that they could do it some other time, since she’d had a long day and her husband was enjoying himself.

  “Don’t be silly. Come on, we’re neighbors.”

  So he climbed out of the car, and they started across the yard. At first the other man just stared at them, his long jaw slackening into an expression of puzzlement. As they came closer, he set the drink on the ground—straight whiskey, it looked like—and unfolded himself from his chair, all his angles straightening simultaneously. He was even taller than Matt had thought. At least six four, if not more. “Hi, there,” he said.

  “Cal, this is our new neighbor. Matt Drinnan. He happened to be in Andover, and when he saw me marching glumly toward the train station, he was kind enough to offer me a ride.” She pointed across the street. “He lives up there, in the blue Queen Anne.”

  As Matt’s hand was enveloped by one twice as large as his own, Cal sighed. “Oh, thank God.”

  “For what?” she said.

  Before offering Matt a drink and demanding that he stay for dinner, Cal said, “When I saw you get out of someone else’s car, my first thought was that you’d had a wreck. Then I realized you didn’t drive to work.”

  Though each of them, in the months ahead, would recall the exact remark differently, all three noted that his initial reaction, upon seeing them together, was to assume disaster had struck.

  in the morning, the old general spent a considerable amount of time in the wine cellars with his winegrower inspecting two casks of wine that had begun to ferment. He had gone there at first light, and it was past eleven o’clock before he had finished drawing off the wine and returned home. Between the columns of the veranda, which exuded a musty smell from its damp flagstones, his gamekeeper was standing waiting for him, holding a letter.

  “What do you want?” the General demanded brusquely, pushing back his broad-brimmed straw hat to reveal a flushed face. For years now, he had neither opened nor read a single letter. The mail went to the estate manager’s office, to be sorted and dealt with by one of the stewards.

  She stuck her finger in the book and closed it, unable at the moment to progress beyond the first page. The other night, after Cal grilled steaks and they sat outside with their neighbor and consumed two bottles of Cabernet, Matt had insisted they walk over to his place so he could loan her his copy of the best novel he’d read in the last two or three years. He hadn’t invited them inside, just let them wait on the porch while he pulled it off the shelf. When he mentioned the book at dinner, she hadn’t recognized the author’s name—Sándor Márai—but kept that to herself because she could tell Matt thought surely she would’ve known his work. Later, this failure to admit her ignorance troubled her and was the main reason Embers had lain untouched on her bedside table until this morning. She’d been spending her daily commute familiarizing herself with work-related documents like the faculty handbook, which listed the school’s policies on tenure, promotion, professional leaves and sexual harassment.

  Holding the novel in her lap, she looked out the window at the houses the train was passing, each right next to the other, and even at this relatively low speed they all blurred together. Perhaps because she was finally back on the East Coast after so many years, she’d been thinking a lot lately about the house she grew up in, the neighborhood where it stood, her mother and father and the people who lived next door.

  At one time she’d felt as much at home in the Connultys’ house as her own, and the couple’s daughter had been her best friend. Her initial bond with Patty was their mutual fondness for something almost everyone else in her circle would have deemed disgusting. They became aware of it a couple of weeks after the Connultys moved in. Until then, they’d studied each other warily through the line of mountain laurel that formed a porous barrier between their backyards. They were ten or eleven at the time and, since it was summer, hadn’t yet met in school. But Mrs. Connulty came by one morning and invited them all to dinner, and though Kristin begged her parents to let her stay home since it was Thursday and her favorite Bewitched episode would rerun that night, they told her she needed to make friends with the girl next door. “Just imagine,” her mother said, “how you’d feel if you didn’t know a soul in the world.” She said the family had moved from Allentown and that Mr. Connulty was the new manager of the Pennsylvania Power & Light plant at Shamokin Dam.

  Afterward, Kristin couldn’t remember what they’d eaten for dinner, though Patty always maintained they had middle-of-the-road fare: roast beef with mashed potatoes, stewed carrots, Brussels sprouts. Dessert, she said, was strawberry shortcake. While the adults sat in the spacious living room and enjoyed an after-dinner drink, the girls were told to go upstairs. A tall, large-boned woman with thick auburn-colored hair, a soft voice and an unusual accent, Mrs. Connulty said, “On your way, look in the pantry. You might find you some treats.”

  The kitchen closet was the kind you walked into, big enough for two girls their age to stand side by side. “Her idea of a treat,” Patty said, “might seem a little bit weird.” She’d barely spoken all night, and Kristin had already decided that she didn’t want to be her friend. Unlike most people, whose expressions were constantly changing, whether happy or sad, puzzled or mad, Patty’s expression remained fixed, as if she’d been captured by a photographer in a moment of bored composure—at church, say, or the funeral of a distant relative.

  “What’s so weird about her idea of a treat?” Kristin asked.

  The other girl flicked on a light. The shelves were stocked as neatly as those at Food Giant, and they were almost as full. Most of what she saw was pretty basic: cans of Le Sueur green peas, boxes of Kraft macaroni and cheese.

  But then Patty reached up and pulled down a round tin like the ones fruit cakes came in at Christmas. “Ever eaten hoop-cheese wafers?” she asked.

  “I don’t think so.”

  Patty pulled the top off, and the tin was filled with crumbly orange things that emitted a pungent smell. “My mother makes stuff like this,” she said. “Want to try one?”

  “What’s in them?”

  “Margarine, flour, red pepper, Rice Krispies and hoop cheese.”

  “What’s hoop cheese?”

  “Something they sell in country stores down south.”

  “That’s where your mother’s from?”

  The other girl nodded. “Prices Fork, Virginia.” She started to replace the lid.

  “Wait,” Kristin said, because
she sensed that she’d behaved exactly as Patty expected, showing revulsion at something unfamiliar; if that was what she expected, it must have happened before. “Let me try one.” As though it were a slimy creature she’d found beneath a rock, she seized a wafer between thumb and forefinger and, despite the awful odor, popped it into her mouth, where it instantly dissolved. A moment or two passed before she realized how wonderful it tasted. “I like it,” she said.

  “Are you joking?”

  “No. Really.” She took another one.

  “Well,” Patty said, choosing a couple for herself, “I actually like them, too.”

  They carried the tin upstairs to Patty’s room and finished off the wafers while watching Bewitched. During the show they reached agreement on a number of crucial points: though her character was obnoxious, Agnes Moorehead had attractive features; Dick Sargent was a better Darrin than Dick York; and Esmeralda was a poor substitute for Aunt Clara. By the time Kristin’s parents got ready to go home, she’d made arrangements to spend the night.

  Over that long summer they became closer and closer, roving South Market Street after pooling change to buy candy and sodas, wading in the shallows of Penns Creek, tossing a Frisbee on the banks of the Susquehanna so George, the Connultys’ clumsy Airedale, could chase it down and bring it back rimed with slobber. Three or four times a week, they took turns sleeping over at each other’s house, where they fell asleep side by side after midnight, often with library books open on their chests. Both of them, it turned out, loved to read. In Kristin’s case, that made sense because her parents taught English and her mother had named her after the heroine of her favorite novel, Kristin Lavransdatter. Mr. Connulty, on the other hand, had an engineering degree, and you never saw his wife open a book.

  The Connultys had met at Virginia Tech. Or, to be more accurate, in the waiting room at the Montgomery Regional Hospital, where he was waiting for them to revive a fraternity brother whose pulse had all but disappeared after he emptied a fifth of Four Roses. Patty’s mother, who was only nineteen then and worked at something called the Dixie Sweet Shop, was waiting for them to release her father, who’d lost a finger in a pulp-mill accident. “She took one look at me,” Kristin had heard Mr. Connulty say, “and thought she knew all there was to know. I was a drunken frat boy, pure and simple. Probably from Northern Virginia, with parents who had plenty of money but not enough vision to send him to William and Mary, Washington and Lee or even UVA.” That his background was different from what she’d imagined evidently weighed in his favor. His father had died at Saint-Mère-Église on D-day, when his parachute deposited him into a house set on fire by a pathfinder’s flare. He and his two brothers were raised by their mother, who taught first grade in Fairfax. He attended Tech on an academic scholarship and, while not at the top of his class, did well there. He earned the money for his frat fees by performing brake jobs three afternoons a week at Firestone. “I convinced her I was worth a second look. Took a lot of hard work, plenty of elbow grease, but it was the best thing I ever did. And though I hate to admit it, I’ve always been glad her father lost that finger.”

  A self-made man: that was what Kristin’s dad said Mr. Connulty was, on one of the rare evenings that summer when neither girl visited the other, the Connultys having gone to Virginia to see their relatives.

  “What other kind of man is there?” her mother asked.

  Her father was drinking his whiskey, and the television was on, the sound turned low as it so often was in those days. On the screen, President Nixon was finishing a speech, his lapels bunched up under his chin because he’d raised his hands above his head to flash the victory sign.

  “There are plenty of other kinds,” her father said, reaching for his Tullamore Dew.

  “So just name one.” Her mother had a book in her lap and continued to look at it as if she were reading, though Kristin knew she wasn’t. When she was reading, she didn’t talk or even listen to what anyone else was saying.

  Her father also had a book in his lap, Leon Uris’s QB VII. He closed it and laid it on the floor. “Take me, for instance,” he said. “I’m not a self-made man.”

  “So what kind are you?”

  “Well, I’m the kind who follows a well-trod path.”

  “Really?”

  “Or maybe I should say a worn path. Aren’t you always trying to make your students enjoy that Welty story?”

  “I don’t try to make them. I try to help them.”

  “Whatever. Anyhow,” her dad said, “my father taught school. And what do I do?” Rather than wait for her answer, he said, “And look at you. I married a beautiful, brilliant woman who also teaches school, just like my own mother did. In other words, I didn’t wander off the path into the forest.”

  He drained his glass, got up, walked over to the sideboard and poured himself a second drink, bigger than the first. Kristin had never seen him do that before. He turned his back to her and her mother, pulled aside the curtain and gazed at the Connultys’ house, though no one was there, not even the dog. They’d taken George with them to Virginia.

  “If Tom Connulty had followed in his father’s footsteps, he would’ve joined the army about five years ago, and probably would’ve died in some rice paddy.” He let the curtain fall, went back to his chair and sat down, the cushions sighing beneath his weight. “And he wouldn’t have married a woman like Sarah.”

  Her father didn’t say why he wouldn’t have married Mrs. Connulty, and her mother didn’t ask. Instead, she looked at her wristwatch, set her book aside and announced dinner would be ready soon.

  Whenever Kristin spent the night over there, Patty’s mother made them special treats: homemade potato chips with green turnip dip, fried pickles with blue cheese dressing, buttermilk pies, pecan cakes with praline glaze, pear fritters. She’d sit at the table with them, always saying she’d try just one of whatever they were having. Then she’d leave them alone. The next morning she’d fix elaborate breakfasts of chicken and waffles, cheese grits or sweet potato pancakes. After they finished eating, she’d ask what their plans were, or if they wanted her to take them anywhere, and if the answer was no she’d wash the dishes and do some cleaning and then turn on the soaps.

  At first Mrs. Connulty didn’t talk a lot when the two families convened for one of their frequent dinners, but as that first year turned into the second and she and Kristin’s mother began to do their grocery shopping together and even took a trip to New York City to see Jesus Christ Superstar, she became a lot more verbal. Occasionally, though neither of Kristin’s parents ever commented on it, at least not in her presence, Mrs. Connulty messed up her grammar. “They gave it to Tom and I,” she might remark, instead of “Tom and me.” Or she might ask, “Where was you?” She sometimes slipped and put an r on the end of a word like “Alabama.” During Kristin’s grad school days in North Carolina, she frequently noted similar verbal mannerisms in shops and convenience stores, and each time she remembered Sarah Connulty.

  In perhaps the first adult-level assessment she’d ever offered of another person, she told Patty, “Your mother is the kindest, most decent person I know.”

  Assessment—the drawing of distinctions between the acceptable and the unacceptable, the accomplished and the inept, the useful and the expendable—was the main thing on her mind when she walked into the office that morning to find Donna waiting, her laptop bagged for the Power Point presentation, her gaze flitting toward the wall clock. They had a tenure and promotion workshop scheduled for nine a.m., and it was already three minutes past. “We’d better hurry,” her assistant said. “It’s a good five-minute walk to the Olsen Center.”

  “They can’t start without us, can they?”

  “No. But there’s such a thing as punctuality.”

  “I know there is. There’s also such a thing as traffic, and my bus proved it this morning.”

  Heading across campus she made an effort, as she had each day, to engage the older woman in small talk. “How’d your
husband’s checkup go?”

  “Fine.”

  “Was his blood pressure lower?”

  “A little.”

  “And the problem with your grandson’s teacher—did that get resolved?”

  “They moved him to another class.”

  Finally, she gave up, and they covered the last hundred yards in silence.

  The auditorium was an institutionally grim bowl with tiered seating for around eighty people. They walked in to find no more than eighteen or twenty faculty members there, most of them sitting by themselves, as if in implicit acknowledgment that going up for tenure was like dying. It could only be done alone.

  While Donna connected her laptop, Kristin welcomed everyone and reminded them that she’d just arrived and was still learning the ropes. “I’m sure I’ll make some mistakes along the way,” she said, “but I’ll do my best to correct them. If at any point you have a problem with that, I hope you’ll first discuss it with me rather than someone else. I promise to do the same.” Then she introduced her assistant, and judging from the looks on the faces of those assembled Donna hadn’t made many friends in this crowd.

  Kristin began her presentation with a list of dates on which probationary files were due to departments and deans. For ten or fifteen minutes she covered the role of mentors, stressing the importance of maintaining constant communication with them, and then she went over the three areas in which tenure-seeking faculty would be evaluated, pointing out that accomplishments in teaching, research and service must be properly documented. “A good file is thorough,” she said. “At the same time, padding obscures real achievement. If you attend a conference in D.C., you don’t need to include a napkin from the Mayflower Hotel to prove you were really there. A program listing your subject or topic will do nicely.” She enumerated recent changes to the tenure and promotion guidelines, noting that the publication requirement had been raised from two juried articles to three and that the service requirement had also been raised from one committee to two.