“Why don’t you crack some eggs and we’ll have scrambled eggs for dinner,” Mom said, and Rebecca nodded. At least she could crack the eggs and scramble them. Good thing Dad wasn’t here, because having breakfast for dinner always made him a little irritable. She let out a laugh that turned into a gasp.
“What?” Mom poured the spitting bacon grease into a coffee can, and as she set the frying pan back on the stove, she looked at Rebecca with her usual big worried eyes.
“I—uh—I just had this thought that Dad would be annoyed if he came home and we had scrambled eggs for dinner. So, at least he won’t be bugged.”
Mom started to laugh too. She stood near the stove resting both hands on the counter, eyes scrunched up as if she were about to let out a sob, except she was laughing. Mom took a breath, ate a scrap of bacon from the bacon plate and started laughing all over again.
It felt so good to laugh, even if what Rebecca had just said wasn’t funny, and was pretty horrible: thank God Dad was gone, so now they could have breakfast for dinner whenever they wanted.
“You’re right, hon. We’ll have eggs tonight, and Brunswick stew tomorrow night, and then we’ll make a great dinner that Dad would love, and maybe he can enjoy it in his own way.” Mom shook her head as if to say, well, doesn’t that beat all, but now Rebecca was crying. She didn’t bother to wipe the tears, just picked up her bowl of eggs and poured them hissing into the frying pan. “I can do it. Let me.”
Mom nodded and lurched back to the table, while Rebecca drew the wooden spoon back and forth across the bottom of the pan, the way Mom had taught her.
* * *
Sam came in a beat early on the transition, and Professor Henderson held up a hand.
“Sorry,” Sam said, even though he wasn’t sorry. Larry Quinn was perpetually slow on the drums, and no one ever called him on it. And Professor Henderson’s arrangement of “Mood Indigo” and “Do Nothing till You Hear from Me” wasn’t working. They started again, ran through the whole thing without stopping, no solos. The jazz band sounded drab and inadequate. Maybe Sam was as bad as everyone else, but still he felt the urge to stand up and scream at Professor Henderson (all the other faculty went by first names in jazz band, but no, not Professor Henderson). Yeah, scream at Professor Henderson about his terrible arrangement and then run out into the snow, and yell some more. But he swallowed the urge, played on. They sounded okay on “A Taste of Honey,” even though anyone with half a personality would choose the mournful Beatles version over this Herb Alpert-y syncopation. Jazz band wasn’t the same without Oliver.
Two sophomores had dropped out this winter because of their schedules, they’d said, but Sam figured they’d picked up on the weird vibe that rehearsals had now, the way no one joked around anymore, the way Professor Henderson seemed crabby and tired and old. Maybe Sam should drop out too. He’d never taken a class with Oliver; he’d known Oliver as a friend, sort of, not as a teacher. Oliver had made Sam feel like his opinions were worth hearing. Oliver thought Sam’s knowledge of the jazz greats was impressive. And that afternoon last spring, Sam had been standing on Main Street not wanting to go back to his dorm or to Lambda Chi, and Oliver had walked by. “Care to grab a coffee?” Oliver said, and Sam followed Oliver down the stairs into the dark-paneled tavern. Oliver ordered a beer and pretzels and Sam said, “Same for me.” It felt good to be listened to as if he had something to say—Oliver had a lot of questions about New York and about Red Wagon Records—and it was good to talk about ancient jazz saxophone guys like Coleman Hawkins and Ben Webster, and not get laughed at for general dorkiness.
Back at school early in the fall, he’d walked into rehearsal one night and Oliver caught his eye in greeting. Momentary though the glance was, a strange tremor raced through him. That night he’d imagined the two of them meeting for dinner or drinks—students had dinner with their professors all the time, and the faculty got just as drunk as the students at the parties after band concerts—but every place he imagined felt wrong. He let the story drift to New York, to some dark jazz club, and he realized he was having a fantasy about a guy. Hell. About an old guy. During band practices, he began to wonder if Oliver’s jokes at their shared music stand were supposed to be flirtatious, if Sam had been an idiot by responding the way he had, and the strange tremor struck him again. Probably he was thinking too much; probably he was imagining things. Still, he wanted to go back to last spring, when Oliver was a friend who Sam was glad to see, who made Sam feel normal.
After the last practice before Thanksgiving break, Sam headed out of the performing arts center, Oliver a pace or two ahead of him. They passed through a gauntlet of modern sculptures that some alum had installed, a group of unidentifiable but enticingly smooth and curving marble forms.
“Hey, Sam, good work tonight,” Oliver said, when they neared the door.
“Thanks,” Sam said.
“We’d love to have you come for dinner sometime,” Oliver said. “Hear some more of your stories from New York, all of that—”
“Thanks. Sure.” He’d interrupted and now he debated whether to apologize for interrupting.
Oliver squinted at the air, as if consulting an invisible calendar. “Or you know what, how about let’s go back to the Tavern for a burger and a beer. Maybe after Thanksgiving?”
“Sure,” Sam said again, his ears and neck hot. “Thanks.”
“You want to say Monday, six o’clock? Or wait until you get back and see how your schedule looks?”
“Monday’s fine,” Sam said.
“A man’s got to eat, right?” Oliver slapped Sam on the back. “Six thirty? Have a good Thanksgiving.”
The Monday after Thanksgiving, Sam got halfway to Main Street before he bailed out. He’d say his train from New York was late getting back, he’d say he had a paper due, he’d say he had a family situation to deal with. He didn’t have the rest of the words, other than he wasn’t that kind of guy. But maybe he was assuming too much anyway. Maybe he’d gotten all of this wrong. He spun around and jogged to Lambda Chi, where he drank four beers and ate part of someone else’s leftover pizza, and trudged back to his dorm room to write his art history paper.
The next morning he’d checked his mailbox; he hadn’t done so since he’d gotten back to school after the holiday. He opened the letter from President Weissman to the Clarendon community. “I have some sad and dismaying news to share,” President Weissman wrote. “Professor Desmarais passed away this weekend. He fell victim to a brain aneurysm.”
And now it was the middle of winter and the jazz band sounded lame, and Sam had messed up the friendship with Oliver, except Oliver had gone and died. Sam kept paging through his memories of rehearsals, of that beer last spring with Oliver, looking for the details he’d missed. It always came back to this: Oliver had liked him, in a way he wasn’t ready to think about, and that’s when he slammed the book of memories closed again. He walked out of rehearsal with Stephen—the snow had picked up, tiny dry flakes, which meant that the Ski Bowl might stay open for another couple of weeks. They’d go to Lambda Chi and have a few beers and get high like they did most nights, and probably talk about the next Granitetones rehearsal—he and Stephen were co-leaders of the Granitetones vocal group this year since no seniors wanted to do it—and maybe no one would care enough to make fun of him around the bar in the basement. He’d get up and go to class tomorrow, do the same thing all over again.
* * *
By 8:00 on Sunday morning, Louise Walsh had finished with her work. She’d graded the last paper, and now she set the stack of them on the hall table, the one decent paper on top. Opposition to manifest destiny—the boys had struggled with this set of prompts. She circumnavigated her little apartment, thinking, planning. It was too early to run the vacuum; she’d wake the Connollys downstairs. Too early to call Lily or Corinna. The A&P didn’t open until noon, and she didn’t want to go to Mo’s and sit alone with her
coffee and pancakes. The thermometer outside her kitchen window said two below, but it was clear, and there didn’t seem to be any wind.
Louise returned to the dark bedroom, banged her shin on the bedframe as she did too often. Limping, she pulled long johns out of the bottom drawer, slipped them on, and then the wool trousers she’d bought long ago as an undergrad in Michigan. She felt a tiny zing of pride that she still fit into them.
Outside, she carried a snowshoe in each hand, paddling the air. She turned left, the houses growing bigger, homes of old alums and chair-wielding professors. She passed Malcolm Ferber’s house with its wraparound porch, its deep front yard, the snow-covered perennial beds tended by Priscilla Ferber. She wouldn’t think about Ferber or any other men this morning. No, she would think about the weather. She’d think about the snow, the way each crystal refracted the light so that her eye caught thousands of tiny rainbows each time she glanced down at it. A tiny visual miracle.
It snowed in Willow Springs when Louise was little, enough to make snow ice cream and snowmen, to sled right down Washington Avenue—there was no equipment to clear the snow, other than what people devised with tractors and push brooms. The snow always disappeared after a day or two. There was never a crystal winter day like you got in New Hampshire.
Near the town pond, she sat on a bench to strap the snowshoes over her boots. Out on the ice, five or six men played hockey, and the sounds carried, the scrape-scrape-scrape of the skate blades, a grunt as one guy lunged for the puck, a curse as another dove ineffectually, the puck whizzing past him. It was beautiful, the way these skaters edged to a stop, then turned, gliding away like they were flying. She hadn’t skated since her own college years; the skates made her too tall and she’d been terrified of falling into a tangled mess. Terrified of getting laughed at.
She pushed up to standing and left the pond behind, snowshoes breaking through the deeper snow in the town forest. Soon her breath had turned sharp and painful, pulse racing. If she could exhaust herself, she wouldn’t hear the words. But sooner or later those wounding phrases intruded. You’re always going to be alone, you know that? What kind of man would have you? You can be ugly and sweet, or you can be pretty and bookish, but you can’t be ugly and bookish. Over the years she’d made aphorisms out of her dad’s hateful, acid words, a scabby sort of armor. No one could think worse of her than what she’d thought about herself. He only wants what’s best for you, her mother used to say, after one of her dad’s rants, and whenever Louise would question that, her mother would close off the conversation. I just don’t understand why you can’t get along with others, Louise. I don’t understand what’s so wrong about Willow Springs. Her mother, so proud of having become a town woman, no longer a farm kid.
Louise felt her armor dropping away only when she sank into her work. Last summer, at the state archives in Jackson, Mississippi, she read deeply and slowly. She read the letters and journals of those Southern women fighting for suffrage, began to understand how they managed not to see their complicity in keeping another group of people down. Her research helped her empathize, even when those women wrote absurdly about God being on their side.
And another wounding phrase, one that she should have forgotten about by now, but that she carried with her. You should be flattered, Randolph had said. More than ten years ago now, her first year at Clarendon, at the Garlands’ annual Christmas party. Louise had gone upstairs to use the bathroom, fairly tipsy, and Randolph came out of the bathroom as she was about to knock. He took her hand—he hadn’t washed his own—then reached up with his other hand, pulling her head down to his level and kissing her on the mouth, hard. She’d been so surprised that she hadn’t thought to let go of his hand, even as she pulled away. “Oh, you’ve been waiting for it,” Randolph said, and like an utter dunce, Louise had felt a blush rise out of her chest all the way to her ears.
“What you need is—”
Louise hadn’t heard whatever Randolph said about what she needed, because she’d managed to spring away, tugging her hand back and turning the corner to run down the stairs.
She’d grabbed her coat and hat from the den, where Oliver and Virginia Desmarais were also gathering their coats. “Merry Christmas,” she heard herself trilling to them, as if the party, and Randolph, had stirred up her holiday spirit.
You should be flattered, he’d said. She didn’t need to hear the rest of the sentence to know what he meant. He meant to wound her, put her in her place. She should have punched him, stomped on his foot, run back into the party to tell Randolph’s wife what her husband had just done. Her new colleague. And at his age. But everyone would have laughed, and said something like, Oh, that’s our Randolph, all right. Hitting on all the girls, even the ugly ones. On this frozen morning years later, the hot blush crept back up, as if she were still standing in the Garlands’ upstairs hallway, attached to Randolph.
Chapter Seven
The math building was on the far side of campus, inconvenient to everything else. From the outside, the math building looked like any other campus building, worn-out brick, its black-painted shutters faded to gray. But the first floor and the basement felt new and sleek, renovated to make room for the mainframe computer and its terminals. Sam liked it here, away from the frats, Commons and his other classes. In here, he didn’t feel so different.
“Pair yourselves up, men,” President Weissman said this morning—President Weissman taught a seminar once or twice a year, and this one, Cryptography and Number Theory, covered the algorithms behind codes, ciphers and computer languages. Sam looked around the seminar table for a partner, but the two guys on either side of him had turned away to choose someone else. Everyone had paired off except for him and Jerry. Jerry the vet, with his ponytail and the leather jacket he wore through the winter, instead of a duffel coat or a ski jacket like everybody else.
Jerry didn’t look at Sam, only closed his eyes as if bored with all of them.
“Two parts to this project. I want you to build a cipher, using classical or modern tenets, and I want you to create a computer code,” President Weissman said. “Your classmates will attempt to solve and use the cipher. As to your computer code, instruct the computer to solve four complex equations.” Back when he was a math professor, President Weissman had persuaded GE to practically give Clarendon its own computer. He turned to the board to write an example equation. “Now, then, men. Go to it for the next fifteen minutes.”
As the other guys rearranged themselves, Sam hoisted his chair and went around to Jerry’s side of the table. “So I guess we’re—”
“Build on the Hill cipher,” Jerry said, instead of Sure, I’ll be your partner, or Get lost, you pip-squeak asshole.
“Okay,” Sam said. The Hill cipher was a substitution cipher from the ’20s, one that used simple algebraic algorithms to scramble messages. The Hill cipher always got him thinking about World War II cryptography, when everything in the world was probably simpler. But the Hill cipher was also the first modern cipher, so the other guys in the class would probably use it too. “Maybe add something to it, or use division instead of multiplication,” Sam said, and he bent to start writing a matrix key in his notebook.
Jerry was scribbling too, and he held out his notebook for Sam to inspect. “Or we could do one with multiplication and another one with division.”
“Complicate things, yeah, that’s good,” Sam said.
President Weissman started lecturing again. Sometimes math was a slog, but this class was the kind of thing Sam’s ten-year-old self would have gone wild over, a grown-up version of the secret decoder rings that he used to pull out of a Cracker Jack box once in a while.
* * *
On Wednesday, he and Jerry met in the snack bar in the student center to work on their project. Jerry set down his tray without a word and shrugged out of his battered leather jacket, hanging it over the back of his chair. Jerry and his jacket smelled of cigare
tte smoke and something else, something like mud or manure.
Sam ate a quarter of his turkey club, slurped at his soda. To break the silence, he asked Jerry where he was from, even though he knew from Jerry’s accent that he was from one of the outer boroughs.
“Queens,” Jerry said.
“Hey, I’m from New York too. Where’d you go—”
“That was a long time ago.” Jerry looked down at his plate, addressing his burger. “I’m not like your kind of New York, okay? You went to private school with the other Richie Rich kids, am I right? And that’s all you know in the world. That’s not me.”
“Uh, that’s not me, either,” Sam said, stung. “That’s like Teddy Burnham. Or Schuyler DePeyster. Or any guy in DKE and KA.” Most of those guys had gone to boarding school—Andover, Choate, Deerfield. Good-looking and overly polite, in a kind of jerky way, they played hockey or squash or football. He wanted to say, Hey, I was a complete failure at Dalton and I don’t know what I’m doing at Clarendon. And I think the wrong things and say the wrong things all the time.
“Uh-huh, right,” Jerry said. He stabbed a fry into his paper cup of ketchup.
“I just meant, I’m not one of those guys—”
“We’re not going to be friends, okay?” Jerry’s voice carried a sharp edge. He shook his head and held up a hand like a cop stopping traffic. “Sorry, I don’t mean to be rude, man.”
“No, it’s okay.” Sam leaned down to pull out his notebook and pencil, his face burning. Jesus, Jerry didn’t need to be so prickly. What was the big deal about asking where he was from anyway? Giant chip on that guy’s shoulder, his dad would say.
“So here’s what I’ve got so far.” Jerry dug into his jacket pocket for a pack of cigarettes and some folded notebook paper. He smoothed out the paper. “I’m still thinking about a bigger matrix to start with, or maybe two medium-sized matrices. And the multiplication and then division to complicate the key. But then each time we go to solve it it’s gonna take—”
The Wrong Kind of Woman Page 7