Morningside Heights

by Joshua Henkin

  “In order to be into this place, you’ll have to get into this place.”

  “How hard is that?”

  “Harder than you can imagine. And once you get in—if you get in—that’s when things really get hard.”

  “Why?”

  “The homework, for one. And the tuition. Do you have any idea how much a college like this costs?”

  “How much?”

  Ginny turned to Pru. “You tell him.”

  “It’s ridiculous,” Pru said, though she didn’t name a figure.

  “Come on,” Ginny said. “Tell him how much.”

  “I have no idea,” Pru said, though she did. But it shamed her to say the number aloud.

  “Do professors’ children get a discount?”

  “I imagine,” Pru said, though she didn’t need to imagine it. Professors’ kids got to go for free. But if she told Ginny this, she’d have to explain why Sarah had turned down Columbia to go to Reed.

  Finally, she was forced to come clean, and she explained that Columbia was two miles from home and Sarah had wanted to go away for college. And Ginny nodded as if to say she understood.

  But a minute later Ginny said, “Seriously, how much is tuition?”

  “Tens of thousands of dollars.”

  Rafe whistled in horror.

  “That’s per year,” Ginny told him.

  Actually, Pru thought, that’s per semester.

  “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you, Rafe. There’s a big world out there, and you have no idea about it.”

  “I’ll take out loans,” he said cheerfully.

  “Don’t go worrying about loans before there’s any need to borrow.”

  “Maybe the professor could adopt me. Couldn’t you, Professor Robin?” Rafe tugged on Spence’s sleeve.

  “We’d adopt him if we could,” Pru said.

  “Well, I wouldn’t let you.” Ginny’s face tightened.

  “Come on,” Pru said. “I was just kidding.”

  “I’ll adopt you,” Spence said. He searched through his pockets for a pen, as if hoping to sign the paperwork.

  Ginny said, “It’s an excellent college, Rafe, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s if someone doesn’t want you, they’re not worth it.”

  “Who says Columbia doesn’t want him?” Hadn’t that been the point of this trip? To take Rafe to see a real college campus? To encourage him to set his sights on things? But seeing Ginny, terse and tightly wound, Pru could tell the visit had backfired. She shouldn’t have admitted that Sarah went away for college. She shouldn’t have made that joke about adopting Rafe.

  * * *

  —

  Pru came home from work one day to find Ginny on the phone.

  “That was Barbara,” Ginny said when she got off. “My old employer.”

  A few days later, Barbara called again, and this time Ginny spoke to her for ten minutes.

  “What was that about?” Pru said. “Not that it’s any of my business.”

  Ginny said, “If Barbara didn’t want it to be your business, she shouldn’t have called me on your phone. She just misses me, that’s all.”

  “Of course she misses you. I miss you when you’re not here and I see you every day.”

  Ginny turned red.

  “Now you’re blushing.”

  “Well, I don’t like compliments. You know that.”

  Pru understood. She didn’t like compliments either, especially when they were issued too forcefully. But she hadn’t intended to be aggressive with Ginny: she was just telling the truth.

  “Barbara’s feeling sorry for herself.”

  “Well, she does have a disease.” Pru wondered why she was sticking up for Barbara, this woman she didn’t even know.

  “Barbara came into the world feeling sorry for herself. It has nothing to do with a disease.”

  “Has she found another aide?”

  “She’s found several.”

  Pru looked up.

  “She goes through people quickly.”

  “So she wants you to recommend someone else?”

  “She wants me to recommend myself.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “She wants me back, Pru.”

  “And what did you tell her?”

  “That I’m not available.”

  “So that was it? End of discussion?”

  Ginny laughed. With Barbara, it was never the end of the discussion. Bring me a softer pillow, Barbara would say. Get me that paper lantern I saw in the gift shop. Buy me that brand of seltzer at Whole Foods, then pick up that brand of gin at the liquor store and make me a Tom Collins.

  “So Barbara wants you to come back and make Tom Collinses for her?”

  “She said she’d hire a car to drive me to Connecticut. And she told me she’d double my pay.”

  “And what did you say to that?”

  “I told you,” Ginny said. “I’ve made a commitment to you. You and the professor—you’re the people I work for.”

  “Well, I’m glad to hear that. Because as much as I’d like to, I can’t get into a bidding war for you.”

  * * *

  —

  But words, once uttered, couldn’t be reeled in, and Ginny started to speak about what they’d been resisting speaking about. So as not to speak about Barbara, they spoke about little else. Barbara with her Tom Collinses and her fuzzy slippers, Barbara whose sheets needed to be folded back just so. Everything in Barbara’s house was hidden behind wood. The TV looked like an armoire. Even the refrigerator had a wood exterior, as if it, too, needed to be hidden. “Barbara’s a strange bird,” Ginny said. She even imitated Barbara’s singing, which was unlike her—to mock someone so directly, or to sing. Ginny referred to Barbara as Barbra Streisand, and Pru referred to her as Barbara Walters, and Ginny referred to her as Barbara Bush, the two of them trying to outdo each other. But it had the counterfeit air of a performance, and in their professed fealty, their ardor for each other, Pru found a fraying, as if something that hadn’t been called into question needed to be shored up.

  * * *

  —

  As she was leaving work the next day, Ginny said, “I’ve gotten another job offer, and the pay starts at twenty dollars an hour.”

  “Is it with Barbara?”

  “It’s with someone else.”

  Pru couldn’t afford twenty dollars an hour. She paid Ginny fifteen, and she couldn’t afford that. “Okay,” she said, “here’s what I can do. I’ll raise your pay to seventeen dollars an hour.”

  Slowly, without fully realizing it, she started to throw in perks. An old chess set she’d found in the closet. Her pass to MoMA and the Met. Tickets to Lincoln Center: she and Spence had a subscription, but now that he couldn’t go, she didn’t want to go either. Crassly, she let it be known how much these tickets cost. Divide that cost over a period of months and she was paying Ginny more than seventeen dollars an hour.

  She took the clothes she didn’t wear anymore and loaded them into shopping bags. She gave Ginny an old bread machine, a toaster oven, and a VCR.

  Ginny took the VCR just as she took Pru’s clothes, with a nod of the head, a pantomime of gratitude. And maybe it wasn’t a pantomime: maybe she really wanted these things. But Pru saw in Ginny’s eyes a clot of resentment, as if she were saying she didn’t need Pru’s castaways, even as she trundled them out the door.

  16

  Pru was at work when she got the call from campus, Ginny’s voice pulled tight as a lanyard. “The professor’s stuck,” she said, and the image Pru had was of Winnie-the-Pooh stuck in the honey jar. “He’s in the bathroom,” Ginny said, “and he won’t come out.”

  Ginny had taken Spence to the men’s room, and half an hour later, he was still inside. She called to h
im through the bathroom door. “You need to come out soon, Professor. Someone will want to use the stall.”

  He didn’t respond.

  “Hello, Professor?” Tentatively, she went inside. Two urinals stood beside each other, with no partition between them: how could men urinate so openly, in public? “Professor?” she said, but he was so quiet she thought he might have passed out.

  Then his feet started to move, pawing over the floor in a frenzy.

  “If you don’t come out, I’m going to have to eat your sandwich for you.”

  “Go home,” he said.

  “I can’t go home. Your wife is paying me to be with you.”

  “I’ll pay you to go home.”

  Finally, she called for help. That had been her mistake, she told Pru over the phone, because as soon as she notified a secretary, another secretary got word, and then an administrator from the chair’s office, and then the chair himself. They were clustered now outside the men’s room.

  “I’ll take care of this,” Pru said when she arrived. She opened the stall door. Spence just sat there with his pants at his feet, staring up at her with a hangdog affect.

  He’d soiled himself. The stink was all over his underwear and pants. She had known this would happen—she was surprised it hadn’t happened yet—but her imagination had been sealed. “Come on, darling, let’s go home. We’ll get you into a new set of clothes. Accidents happen.” She reached over to help him up.

  * * *

  —

  When she got to the chair’s office the next morning, he closed the door behind her and ushered her inside. Looking at him from across the vast expanse of his desk, she had the outrageous premonition that she was about to take an exam. She was back in graduate school, defending the dissertation she hadn’t even written.

  The chair was fair-complected, and he had a shaved head. He wore an earring, and he was dressed fashionably, in a navy silk shirt and a tie the color of beef tongue. A dandy, Spence had called him once. He’d said that word without asperity; the truth was, he thought most of his colleagues—most English professors in general—were dandies; he had a low bar when it came to such things.

  The chair was in his mid-forties, and he was relatively affable. Pleasant enough was the term Spence had used. He did reasonable scholarship. Unspectacular, Spence had said, but then spectacular was reserved for the chosen. He’d been a competent chair, and Spence was grateful that he made the trains run on time and that he ensured that Spence himself would never have to be chair.

  The chair and his wife had had Pru and Spence over for dinner once, and Pru and Spence had reciprocated. Noises had been made about further socializing. The chair had a house in the country, and there had been talk of a weekend visit, but nothing came of it. Spence and the chair had a collegial relationship, but then that was Spence’s relationship with everyone in the department: there was a reason they were called colleagues. He had turned down other job offers, and one of the reasons was that if you lived in Cambridge or Madison or Berkeley or Hyde Park, your colleagues weren’t just your colleagues, they were your friends. In New York, you got to wear your cloak of anonymity.

  Now, though, sitting across from the chair, Pru thought they had miscalculated. They should have been more sociable with the chair and his wife. They should have invited them over for dinner more; they should have gone up to their house in the country.

  Though whom was she kidding? No number of gatherings at country houses would have prevented her from sitting where she was sitting now.

  The chair laid his fists on the desk: little mounds of dough, like dinner rolls. “Pru.”

  “Alex.” What was the phrase that passenger had used, the one heard over the voice recorder on September 11? Let’s roll?

  The chair told Pru what a great scholar Spence was, and also an electrifying teacher. The chair had gone to Duke, and he invoked the Duke basketball team, outside of whose arena the students would camp out for nights at a time to secure tickets; the Cameron Crazies, the students were called. That was what it was like to have Spence in the department, the lengths students went to to get into his class. “This is very painful for me.”

  Pru didn’t doubt it was, but then the chair twisted his hands in a gesture of pain, which turned his sincerity into something else. “Spence is a once-in-a-generation scholar.”

  “I know that.”

  “Pru, it’s a terrible disease.”

  She knew that too.

  “What happened yesterday afternoon…”

  “Believe me, Spence feels terrible about it. No one feels more humiliated than he does.”

  “The thing is, it wasn’t the first time.”

  “Of course it was.” If it had happened before, didn’t the chair think she would know about it?

  “There have been other things.”

  “Like what?”

  “He wanders through the hallway.”

  “That’s what hallways are for. To wander through.”

  “It’s just…”

  “He has Ginny,” she said.

  “And by all accounts, she’s doing a very good job. But she gives him—how should I put it—perhaps a longer leash than is ideal.”

  “It’s important to have autonomy,” Pru said. “Ask any doctor.”

  “I understand that, and if it were just Spence I had to worry about, the solution would be simple. But I have the rest of the department to contend with. Spence has wandered into colleagues’ offices. He’s scared people.”

  “Just by walking in?”

  “He’s begun to make noises. Sometimes he moans. It can be disorienting.”

  “To Spence?”

  “To him, too, I imagine. It’s been happening in the classroom as well. There have been complaints—more than a few, if I’m being honest. Some students have become frightened.”

  “Oh, come on, Alex. Spence wouldn’t hurt a fly. At this point, he’s not even capable.”

  The chair reached across the desk. Was it possible he was going to touch her? “Pru, I’m afraid the end has come. Spence can’t teach for us anymore.”

  “But he’s not teaching for you anymore. He just sits at the front of the classroom. His TAs are doing the teaching for him.”

  “And that’s not fair to anyone.” Spence, the chair said—the man he’d been colleagues with for fifteen years—that man wouldn’t want to be placed beside the podium, perched there like a toad. “You can’t convince me he’d want that.”

  The chair was right. If Pru had shown the old Spence what the new Spence was like, the old Spence would have been horrified. But the old Spence couldn’t see the new Spence, and when Pru told the new Spence that he should retire, the new Spence refused. Because, feeble as he was, compromised as he had become, he hadn’t lost his will. And was she going to ignore the wishes of the man she’d eaten breakfast with this morning, the man she would lie in bed with tonight, to respect a man who no longer existed? “I’m sorry,” she said. “I can’t get him to retire.”

  “And you shouldn’t have to.” In her position, the chair said, he wouldn’t be able to, either. “This isn’t easy,” he said. “If it was, we’d have had this conversation months ago.”

  “So you’re forcing him out?”

  The chair nodded.

  “Effective when?” She took out her calendar as if to write down the date, but she just left it unopened.

  “The end of the semester.”

  “What about his salary?”

  “He’ll be paid until then.”

  “And after that?”

  “He’ll have his IRA.”

  Pru stood up.

  “And another thing. He can keep his office.”

  “For how long?”

  “For as long as he—for as long as you both want him to. His aide, the woman who help
s him…”

  “Ginny.”

  “She can bring him in whenever she’d like. Once a month, once a week, every day if she must, though I’d recommend against doing it that often.”

  Pru was rifling through her bag, searching for something, she didn’t know what.

  “Office space in this department,” the chair said, “I don’t have to tell you the kind of demand it’s in.”

  And Pru didn’t have to tell the chair that Spence deserved it. The things he’d done for Columbia for the past thirty-plus years. He should have been allowed to keep his office in perpetuity, to pass it down to his children and grandchildren.

  Pru was halfway out the door when the chair called out. “We’ll throw him a retirement party! Big or small, however you’d like it! We want it to be something that befits the occasion!”

  But there was no party that befitted the occasion, and so there wouldn’t be one.

  17

  “They made Spence retire,” Pru told her mother over the phone. “They tossed him out on his ear. And I’m living with a caregiver in my home. I don’t have any privacy anymore.”

  “I’ll move to New York,” her mother said. “I’ll help take care of him.”

  “You can’t do that.”

  “Why not? What do I have keeping me here? This old house? A handful of friends, who are growing old themselves?”

  Years ago, Pru had suggested her mother move to New York. That way, she could spend more time with Sarah, and when she got older, Pru and Spence could help take care of her. But she’d refused: her life was in Columbus. And if her life had been in Columbus then, how much more so now?

  “The difference is, now you need me.”

  That was the problem. Having her mother, at eighty-two, help take care of her husband was a reversal of the cosmic order. It was bad enough that Spence had taken over her life; she couldn’t let him take over her mother’s life, too.

  “Then I’ll fly in for a week. Dad’s yahrtzeit is coming up. We’ll go to shul together.”