Jorgensen’s anger startled Jack. True, they had both put down a lot of whiskey and that turned certain temperaments aggressive, but he still couldn’t see how Daddy could take offence to what he had said.
“All I mean is we were pretty much linked once,” said Jack. “Identified with each other, so to speak. And when you fell, you brought me down with you. I mean, in the eyes of the department.”
“Empires fall,” said Daddy. “Guys like you don’t fall. Because your feet never touched the first rung on the ladder, Jackie. You can’t fall from the ground floor.” He paused and raked Jack with a hard look. “And you can give it a rest. I mean, the innocent guise. It hardly matters anymore. It’s been forty years. And I didn’t fall, as you so dramatically put it. My legs got chopped out from under me. I’ve got a pretty good idea who chopped them. You. Because you wanted revenge for Linda.”
“You’re wrong,” said Jack. “I only found out about you and Linda after you left town. That’s when the rumour reached me.”
“Really?” Daddy slung one long leg over the other, leaned back in the sofa. “I wish she were here,” he said. “Then the lovely Linda could confirm your story. Or not.”
Jack said, “Ernest somebody or other was the one who ratted you out. Not me. Stoyko told me about him. Ernest consulted with Stoyko about what he should do.”
For a moment Daddy looked uncertain. “Ernest? I can’t picture him.”
“He wasn’t a guy anyone noticed. I don’t remember much about him except that he had enormous aviator glasses. I think he was studying to be some kind of Protestant minister.”
Now Jorgensen was truly baffled. “A theology student? Why would I let a theology student into my seminar?”
“I don’t know. Maybe you let him in because you sniffed him giving off moist, sticky, Christian idealism. You liked knocking the illusions out of people and what better target than a Martin Luther King fan? But Ernest had a trick or two up his sleeve.” Jack could scarcely stop himself from grinning at the thought of Daddy undone by Ernest. “Earnest Ernest the mole, the secret agent man. Never raised an objection to what you said in class, just sat there looking troubled and pained, until his social conscience got the better of him. Until he asked himself what would Martin Luther King do in such a morally compromising situation? Gandhi? Bonhoeffer? It happens to people in the caring professions, those crises of conscience. Apparently Ernest was a very caring guy.”
“Ernest somebody or other,” Jorgensen said softly to himself. “Macdonald would never give me the name of the student who brought the accusations against me. Macdonald said he wanted to keep everything as friendly and informal as possible.”
When Ernest had mentioned to Stoyko how disgusted he was at having to read Drumont’s La France juive in Daddy’s seminar, Stoyko had encouraged him to take the matter to the head of the department. And that’s exactly what Ernest had done.
The fact that he’d been done in by somebody he had no memory of seemed particularly galling to Jorgensen. “I remember the day Macdonald called me into his office for a scolding,” he said. “He had a copy of La France juive on his desk, passages bookmarked. He insisted on reading each one out to me. When he finally finished, he said one of my students had come to him to object about the book. Macdonald said he was inclined to sympathize with the objection. He wanted my justification for exposing students to such slanderously anti-Semitic statements.” Daddy smiled. “I said to Macdonald, ‘I, for one, have never said anything that could be taken to be anti-Semitic. I have never said anything slanderous. The opinions expressed in the written material assigned by me are the author’s, not mine.’ ”
“How politically astute. Playing lawyer, splitting hairs with the head of the department,” said Jack.
Daddy ignored that. Some inner compulsion to revisit his struggle with Macdonald seemed to have gripped him. Daddy said that he had told the head that he had assigned La France juive because understanding Drumont’s influence on French public opinion was absolutely necessary to provide a context for the Dreyfus Affair.
He went on to say that Macdonald had wondered out loud if it might not have been wiser for him to summarize Drumont’s views and point out to students how baseless they were. He said the unsophisticated among those who were required to read Drumont’s work could very easily misinterpret, think they were being forced to consume anti-Semitic propaganda. That certainly was what one member of the class thought.
Daddy retorted that he couldn’t be held responsible for what an idiot thought. And as for giving the members of the class a neat and digestible version of What They Should Think, wasn’t it the policy of the department to encourage the future historians they were training to use original documents and primary sources from which to draw their own conclusions?
None of this went down well with Macdonald. Tottering towards retirement at the end of a career that could not in any sense be described as distinguished made him doubly touchy and resentful at being talked back to by a junior colleague. “He turned nasty just like that,” said Daddy. “If I wouldn’t take the hint then he was going to bring me to heel with the choker chain. You know what the old prick said to me? That above all else he valued a ‘culture of cooperation’ in the department. This was the sort of situation that could very easily get out of hand. The complainant had made threats about contacting B’nai Brith to inform them that an anti-Semite was being given free rein to spread his poison in the university. If I refused to remove La France juive from my reading list there would surely be ‘consequences for someone who demonstrates so little concern for the reputation of his colleagues.’ Toe the party line or else was his message. He made it clear that if I didn’t do as I was told, I would have no supporters in the department when I applied for tenure.” Daddy fell into a long silence. Then in a quiet voice that Jack had to strain to hear he said, “I couldn’t do it, Jackie. I couldn’t back down. Not to that fucking mediocrity. Out of the question.”
The living room was almost completely dark now, crowded with shadows. It seemed to Jack that Daddy might be prone to regrets, just as he was. Until that minute he would never have entertained the idea that Jorgensen could harbour second thoughts. He said, “So you slapped his face. Well, you always liked to slap faces. Although I still don’t know why you had to slap mine. Linda, I mean.”
“There you go being dramatic. Dramatic and bourgeois. Linda and I had a bit of fun. That’s all. I wasn’t slapping your face.”
“But she was my wife. Didn’t that mean anything to you? Why did it have to be her?”
“Why Linda? I don’t know. It’s like when they asked the guy who had decided to climb Mount Everest why he wanted to do it, and he said, Because it’s there.” He shrugged. “Linda was there.”
“That’s your fucking reason? Because she was there?”
“Not entirely. Linda always had something about her.”
“Oh really. There’s an excuse for bad behaviour. She had something about her. You want to help me understand? Explain to me, as far as you were concerned, what exactly that something was.”
“If you can’t see it, I can’t tell you what it is.”
“Okay, if you can’t explain what your something was, explain this,” said Jack, struggling to feign composure. “You wanted to supervise my thesis. You courted me. I was the one who was always at your side in the Apollo Room. You counted on me. You believed in me. So why treat me like shit?”
“Counted on you? Believed in you. Do you think there was something special about you?” Daddy shook his head in disbelief. “Let me explain it to you. The truth is, unlike the rest of the graduates from Bumfuck High and Podunk Comprehensive who made up the student body of this Harvard of the flatlands, you could read French just competently enough to research a thesis on modern French history. I had to make do with what crooked timber I could lay my hands on. That’s it.”
“I don’t believe that. Not for a second.”
“Indulge yourself. What you n
eed to believe is nothing to me.”
In silence, Jack watched Jorgensen roll a cigarette. Focusing on the fastidious way he manipulated the tobacco and paper helped Jack to put the brakes on his brain, helped stop it from testing the truth of his memories against what had just been said. Daddy began to roll another cigarette; when he finished it, he passed it to Jack. Was this a kind of apology? Jack accepted the cigarette and Daddy poured them each a drink. They lit up, curtaining the room in smoke. After a bit, they started to talk again; stepping back from the past they spoke of nothing but inconsequential things: Jorgensen’s upcoming cruise, the possibility that Jack might take some Spanish lessons come winter. They chatted like retirees sketching lives chock full of small, discreet pleasures.
At about nine o’clock Jorgensen began to exhibit signs of restlessness; a short time later he announced it was time for him to go. At the door, the two men shook hands clumsily. “We’ll have to do this again,” said Jack. It was the sort of thing that he had said to guests a hundred times. The words left his mouth without a thought.
“I don’t think so,” Daddy replied. His face grew sombre under the door light. “Tell Linda I was sorry to have missed her. Good luck when she gets home.” With that gnomic warning, he went down the steps and waded into the darkness.
Jack returned to the living room, stretched out on the suitably hard and penitential Danish mid-century sofa. What had he hoped to gain by bringing up all this old business about Linda? What would an apology or explanation from Daddy be worth? Piss all. Nothing would change. Besides, even in the unlikely event Jorgensen understood his real reasons for acting the way he had all those years ago, he wasn’t a man to make excuses or give away anything he didn’t want to. Years ago, he had stood firm and refused to remove La France juive from his class syllabus. His attitude had been fuck the head of the department and fuck the department too. Curiously, there had been none of the consequences his colleagues had feared, no public scandal. In the end, righteous Ernest had apparently lost his nerve and decided not to denounce the most popular professor on campus. He simply dropped the class.
There were, however, consequences for Daddy. By defying Macdonald, he had made sure he would never get tenure. He had no alternative but to hand in his resignation and begin the search for another job. Jack faced consequences too. Jorgensen’s resignation left him sitting high and dry, without a supervisor, and with a thesis topic now irrevocably tainted.
Naturally, Jack had wondered if Ernest hadn’t been right when he accused Daddy of being a rabid Jew-hater. It had seemed conceivable, maybe even likely. Why else had Jorgensen been so insistent that Jack examine the legal proceedings that had condemned Robert Brasillach to death if it wasn’t to discredit them? Why had Daddy been so fascinated with a man who was no more than a minor footnote in a terrible period of French history?
Jack saw another possibility now. Maybe it was only the Brasillach persona and the Brasillach style that had meant anything to Daddy, maybe the man’s opinions had been immaterial to him. Certainly Brasillach had been everything Daddy had longed to be. Brasillach was a genuine boy wonder, reigning enfant terrible of French letters, savage annihilator of literary reputations, a real force, not somebody striking bad-boy poses at a second-rate university. Like Daddy, Brasillach had hated everything and anything middle-class, everything and anything that smacked of compromise and caution. Like Daddy he had had an insatiable hunger for attention, and nothing attracted attention like outrageous opinions outrageously expressed. What was more uncompromising and outrageous than fascism? It strutted, preened, scoffed, slandered, and insulted. It dismissed and denied boundaries.
Even when on trial for his life Brasillach couldn’t stop pretending there were no boundaries when it came to him. He refused to take back a single word, refused to show contrition for anything he had said or written. At thirty-five, he was executed for being Robert Brasillach.
With Brasillach as his beau idéal, with Brasillach as his emotional doppelgänger, could Daddy do anything else but choose self-destruction too?
Right now, Jack was contending with his own doppelgänger. The one he had seen floating on his fridge door just hours ago was now hovering in his peripheral vision. Trying to see it more clearly did nothing but lure him into sleep.
The sound of footsteps woke Jack. He listened to Linda pass down the hallway to their bedroom, heard the door gently close. Jack was certain that she was not being quiet out of consideration for him, was certain that she was not doing her best to avoid waking him. From experience he knew that when Linda was most furious, she was softly, quietly furious. That had certainly been the case when, four months after Jorgensen had left town, Stoyko had let him in on what everybody else already seemed to know. That Linda had been sleeping with Daddy. When he confronted her, she had made no attempt to deny it. In a voice that barely qualified as a whisper, she had said coldly, “Face it. You could care less that I betrayed you. It’s Jorgensen betraying you that’s really got you upset. Well, I just fucked him. Unlike you, I’m not in love with him.”
Jack had forgiven her – halfway forgiven her. Not that Linda had asked for forgiveness. She never felt any guilt for things she did. In her mind, what was done belonged to the past, and she had no interest in the past. She was always looking ahead. Maybe that was what made her such a successful realtor.
However, she wasn’t likely to concede him the exemption from guilt she granted herself. Springing Kurt Jorgensen on her like a jack-in-the-box was not something she would let go of, he was sure of it.
Truth be told, maybe throwing all this in Linda’s face had only been his pathetic attempt to wrong-foot her, to throw her a little off-balance. She had been so confident, flying so high for such a long time. It wouldn’t hurt his wife to be reminded that in her day she had done a stupid thing or two. Her success hadn’t been good for Linda, had been even worse for him. Things had been bad between them for a considerable period of time and now they were going to go downhill fast. Not bad enough for either Linda or he to ask for a divorce – there were too many practical considerations for that to be feasible: there were the girls and the grandchildren to consider, and Linda would be hard-headed enough not to wish to contemplate a division of property now that there was quite a lot of property to divide. Most of it earned on her watch.
One thing was for sure, and this he hadn’t foreseen, what had happened tonight was going to cut his legs out from under him in the debate concerning the preposterous château. His hating the house would make it even more attractive to her. He supposed the uncomfortable sofa he was lying on now would soon be going the way of the buffalo. The château would need to be decorated with either overstuffed Victorian furniture or maybe a pricey French country antique look.
Jack glanced at his watch. One o’clock. He curled up even tighter on the sofa, knees drawn up to his chest, desperately trying, without success, to hug sleep to him. He began to sweat and tremble. With the cruel clarity of a hallucination, he saw the château in every detail. Above all, he saw the shadowy figure behind the stained-glass window, studying him, scrutinizing him.
In a haze of exhaustion, he recognized who the figure was. It was Jack Corbin waiting for Jack Corbin to arrive home, arrive at the place to which every step and misstep he had ever made had been leading him for years. There he would stand, keeping watch behind a stained-glass window, waiting for Daddy Lenin to pass by on the street where they both now lived, hoping that the only person whose opinion had ever counted with him might break stride, pause, give him a wave confirming that, yes indeed, Jack Corbin had once shown extraordinary promise. A final sign from Daddy, before he resumed his frantic clip and continued on his way.
Acknowledgements
THE STORIES IN THIS COLLECTION were published in slightly different variations in: Epoch: “1957 Chevy Belair”; Planet: The Welsh Internationalist: “The Jimi Hendrix Experience”; The Walrus: “Live Large”; Prairie Fire: “Tick Tock.”
I would like to
thank my editor, Ellen Seligman, and my agent, Dean Cooke, for their valued counsel, assistance, and support over many years.
Daddy Lenin and Other Stories Page 22