by David Hicks
“Idiot,” Briggs had muttered as he blasted the six-ball with a sharp crack into the corner pocket.
As for Flynn’s mother, once an attractive blonde with pronounced cheekbones, a keen sense of humor, and a sultry way of interacting with strangers (Flynn’s earliest memory is of standing waist-high to her at the supermarket checkout as she complimented the “bronze, muscular arms” of the teenaged bagboy before asking him to carry her groceries to the car), she had, following the death of Flynn’s father, taken the life insurance money as an excuse to quit her job as the principal’s secretary at White Plains High School, acquire some cats, step up her smoking habit, and scale back her already limited culinary activity, gnawing on a piece of toast in the morning, skipping lunch entirely, and heating up a TV dinner for Flynn in the evening while crunching Charles Chips from the extra-large tin.
In contrast, the young scholars at 17 Younger Drive ate like Romans, most of their meals taking the form of piled-high plates from Honest John’s buffet, pre- or post-shift. When they were not working at the restaurant, they spent their free time watching television (The Simpsons, Northern Exposure, and The Martin Short Show were among their favorites), grading, preparing for classes (which were, that first semester, Restoration Drama, American Modernist Poetry, and the Teaching Practicum), or discussing pedagogy. Of the two, Flynn was proving to be the more thoughtful and innovative instructor. He required his students to write op-ed columns and mail them to their hometown newspapers; he led them on walks through the poor neighborhoods near campus so they could interview residents to get their life stories; he facilitated “silent conversations” during which they discussed current events by way of writing to one another in small groups; he asked them to grade their own essays before he did. If he had a flaw, it was in the generosity of his grading; by November, Faustino was calling him “The Fresh Prince of B+.” Even though he felt not a glimmer of the kind of certainty Faustino seemed to feel about the professoriate (“Teaching literature to young people,” their fearless leader had pronounced that first day, breathing through his nose like Orson Wells, “is the most satisfying way to earn a paycheck that I can think of”), he did enjoy his new work environment. Not his actual, physical environment—for after a crisp and sunny week in early October, the sky above Madisonville had turned morose, and there seemed no relief in sight from the pervasive gloom—but the campus environment, so rife with young people on the verge of changing the world, including young women seemingly determined to defy the encroaching autumnal chill with their exposed and goosebumped flesh. He enjoyed as well the company of his fellow graduate assistants, who were kindhearted and quirky; he even had a friendly date with one of them, the nasal-voiced Pakistani named Amita, which ended with a healthy front-seat makeout immediately followed by the news that her boyfriend would soon be returning from his military tour in Somalia. At the same time, he sensed no potential for a genuine kinship with any of them (with the possible exception of Briggs, now that he was lightening up a bit, cooking late-night pots of chili and relishing Flynn’s cinnamon-raisin French toast on Sundays), to say nothing of a legitimate romance—although he did enjoy, in late October, what most people would call a one-night stand, but what Flynn privately classified even in the very heat of the moment(s) as an enriching educational experience, with a thirty-nine-year-old single mom he met at Jack’s Joint while shooting pool with Briggs. And regarding his students, while their youthful vigor made him smile, and while he freely engaged in rigorous nocturnal fantasies featuring a select few, he was well aware that he was in a position of authority and thus resolved never to abuse that position, and he was aware as well that emanating from most of them was not so much sexual fantasies about their young professor but a resistance to, even a resentment of, what he was offering them, a manifestation perhaps of their middle class bitterness over what they were beginning to glean was, at bottom, an insanely expensive and cleverly disguised form of imprisonment.
Still, he treated them with compassion (after all, hadn’t he been in that very prison only months earlier, sitting in a similar classroom with the same gray sky out the window?), and taught them earnestly, seeking to improve his craft as well as theirs with each passing week. Rest assured, he made his share of rookie mistakes: he once walked into a crowded classroom and started writing on the board, preparing his lesson on Aristotelian rhetoric, only to have a Biology professor enter and inform him he was in the wrong room (after which Faustino called him “the Absent-Minded Trespasser”); and during a conference in the GA office with one of his students, a fetching blonde named Linda Gustafson, she started crying about failing her Chemistry test, and Flynn gave her a hug (inhaling the scent of her shampoo as she sobbed into his shoulder), only to see Slowick walk in, turn on his heels, and return to his office, afterwards telling him, “No hugging students. Ever. Not a good idea.”
After which Faustino dubbed him “The Norse Whisperer.”
But despite these and other transgressions, he had what by all accounts must be deemed a successful first semester. Certainly his freshmen found so endearing their young professor’s lanky pacing, his cheerful forgiveness of their clumsy errors, his encouragement of their rebellious impulses (“Screw what your father thinks! You’re all legal adults now!”), his self-deprecating jokes, and his insistence that they voice strongly their tentative ideas and “think with complexity,” that by Thanksgiving Break, Flynn, of all the graduate assistants the least well-read and most ill-equipped for the profession of professor, had become one of the most popular professors at Devlin College.
Faustino noticed. One Monday in December, when the kid passed his doorway at the usual time, wearing his corduroy jacket and carrying the worn leather satchel he had probably purchased at a thrift store (which made him look like a teenager dressing up as a professor for Halloween), Faustino barked out his name, and Hawkins back-stepped in a clunky moonwalk, Michael Jackson style, until he stood in profile at the doorway.
“I’m going to Chicago for a conference,” Faustino said. “Want to cover for me?”
Hawkins raised an eyebrow. “Cover? Your classes?”
Faustino held up a meaty finger, as if pointing to God. “Just one. The upper-level.” He had already decided that at the end of his Intro to Lit class on Tuesday he would give his students the day off on Thursday; then in the midst of their euphoria and gratitude, he’d pass out course evaluations. Bada bing.
“The upper-level?”
Faustino nodded. “American Tragedy,” he said. “We’re doing Death of a Salesman.”
“Salesman?” Hawkins said.
“Is there an echo in here?”
What he would never tell Hawkins is that when he taught his first upper-level class, he had broken out in a sweat as soon as he walked in the room and said, Is it just me or is it hot in here?
“I’ll give you my notes,” he said.
*
That Thursday, Flynn walked into American Tragedy (the English majors regarding him with a chilly skepticism), introduced himself, and immediately distributed the quiz Faustino had told him to administer. As the students bent to the task, Flynn scanned the quiz himself, stopping at question number six: At the end of Act One, Biff finds a rubber hose. Exactly where in the basement does he find it?
What a ridiculous question. He glanced up at the students and cleared his throat. “Excuse me, everyone. If you want to skip number six, be my guest. I’m changing it to a bonus question. Extra credit only.” The students sighed with relief, except for two girls in the front, who seemed disappointed.
Once he collected the quizzes and opened the class discussion, he found himself in an oasis of liberal humanitarianism and nuanced analysis. For every question he asked, several hands flew up. The students argued over whether Willy Loman deserved their admiration or sympathy, and whether Biff’s story mattered more than his father’s. They asked intelligent questions, some of which Flynn couldn’t a
nswer. “If Miller really wanted us to sympathize with his ‘tragic hero,’” one student said, making air quotes, “why is he such a despicable, egotistical wife-beater? What is it about this play that everyone thinks is so great?”
Willy Loman as a despicable wife-beater? A nineteen-year-old challenging the value of an American classic? This was nothing short of thrilling.
*
The following Monday, James Faustino sat in his office with his door wide open instead of the usual six-inch crack that, he hoped, deterred would-be whiners. When his young protégé walked past at the usual time, Faustino cleared his throat and held up the stack of quizzes he had found on his desk.
“Oh,” the kid said.
After an uncomfortable plane ride that forced Faustino to realize it was no longer physically possible for him to sit in coach, he had arrived in Chicago, where it was snowing sideways, and caught a monster of a cold. To add insult to injury, only four people showed up for his panel on “Does the White Male Perspective Still Matter?” He had proposed it to the American Literature Conference solely so he could enjoy a reimbursable dinner with an old friend from his NYU days, but as it turned out, his friend injured his back while shoveling and was incapable of leaving the house. On top of all that, every time Faustino called home Joanna had complained of odd pains in her lower back, and in spite of Faustino’s insistence that she go to the doctor or the Emergency Room (he suspected a kidney stone), she chose to suffer in silence (except when speaking to him, of course) until he returned. When he did so, after another uncomfortable flight (the woman seated next to him made a point of sighing audibly and leaning away from the parts of him that spilled over the armrest, even more so when he hacked out a series of phlegmy coughs), he had a restless night’s sleep and had arrived at his office to this stack of quizzes, on one of which was scribbled, “Professor Hawkins said we could skip #6 because it’s such a lame question.”
He took off his reading glasses. “Lame?”
“Well, no,” Flynn said, reaching to see for himself. “I didn’t say—”
Faustino pulled back the quizzes. “Let me tell you something, ‘Professor’ Hawkins. When I ask you to give my students a quiz I’ve been giving them for over twenty years, you give the quiz. As is. Capeesh?”
Flynn nodded. “Yes sir,” he said.
Faustino put his reading glasses back on and lay his fist on the desk, poised for the “Dismissed” gesture.
“But . . . ” Flynn said.
Faustino raised his eyebrows, which, he knew from looking in the mirror, had the effect of forming three creases in the acre of forehead above them.
“. . . it is an unfair question,” Flynn said.
Faustino sat back and threw his reading glasses onto his desk. Did he need this? He let out a series of violent coughs, his ribs sore, his lungs watery.
“I re-read the play before class,” Hawkins said, “and even I couldn’t tell you where exactly Biff found that rubber hose. You’ve read it, what, thirty times?”
Faustino let out a lip-fluttering exhale, like a tired mule. He could see where this was headed, but he had learned, in three decades as a professor, that it was better to let young people fully express their moronic opinions instead of interrupting to correct them.
“And that was the first time for most of them,” Flynn said, turning around the Ernest Hemingway bobble-head doll on Faustino’s desk “It’s a little picky, is what I’m saying. With all due respect. It’s not a learning tool, which is what quizzes should be. According to Dr. Slowick.”
Faustino templed his hands and took a breath. With all due respect, he wanted to say, you should shut the fuck up. What was it with kids these days?
“It’s supposed to be picky,” he said. “It’s supposed to be unfair.”
Flynn frowned.
“It makes the kids who read closely feel good about themselves. And it makes the knuckleheads feel like they may have skimmed too quickly. Biff finds the hose behind the fuse box, the power center of the house. Willy, the human power center, is impotent. Biff has potential, but he’s been rendered impotent as well, by his father’s grandiose dreams for him—he can’t ever live up. The way America can’t ever live up to its potential. Get it?”
Flynn nodded. “Okay, but . . .”
“So I was curious to see how closely they read. I was guessing Dani and Nicolette, the two girls in front, would know the answer. And they did. They read more closely than you did, apparently. Anyway I don’t even count the quiz. It’s meant to be a ‘conversation starter.’ They take the quiz, I go over the questions, and each one starts a conversation. That particular conversation would have been about the symbol of the hose, the symbol of the fuse box.”
“Oh,” Flynn said.
“So you see,” Faustino said, “it’s not just a quiz, it’s a ‘learning tool’.”
The kid nodded, his face turning red. Faustino sat back and reminded himself that this was a twenty-two-year-old he was talking to, one that was getting a little caught up with how good-looking and “cool” he was.
“Listen, son,” he said, “these kids, they need to be challenged. Our job is not to be liked, or popular, or fair. It’s to make them better thinkers. Better people.”
Flynn nodded. “I’m sor—“”
“Save it,” Faustino said, flicking out his two fingers, and Flynn bowed his head and exited.
But as soon as the kid left, Faustino missed him.
*
By spring semester, word had apparently spread among the faculty that Flynn was a worthy substitute, so others also called on him when they attended conferences or fell ill. One afternoon in April, after teaching Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” for Slowick’s Brit Lit survey, the two star English majors, Dani and Nicolette, approached him with a proposal: they wanted to create a “literary garden” on campus.
“A what?” Flynn said. He pictured old books stuck on spikes inside a labyrinth.
Nicolette took out a map of the Devlin campus and drew a big arrow pointing at a blank patch outside Palmer Hall. “Here,” she said. “There’s a bunch of dead bushes there right now. We want to clear that area and plant flowers.”
“Flowers that appear in literary works,” Dani said.
“Like ‘the coming musk-rose’,” Nicolette said, widening her eyes at Dani, and they burst out laughing.
“So can you help us?” said Dani.
“Maybe bring it up to your ‘elders’?” said Nicolette.
Flynn nodded. “I’ll do what I can,” he said, wondering what Faustino would think.
“Garden, schmarden,” is what his professor said when Flynn relayed the students’ idea. But then Faustino sat back in his desk chair, lifted his eyes to the ceiling, and spread his massive hands like a priest at the altar.
“God made a beauteous garden,
With lovely flowers strown,
But one straight, narrow pathway
That was not overgrown.
And to this beauteous garden
He brought mankind to live,
And said, ‘To you, my children,
these lovely flowers I give.”
Flynn stuck his finger in his mouth and pretended to vomit. “Ann Bradstreet?” he said. “Your grandmother? A Hallmark card you picked up for Mother’s Day?”
Faustino shook his head. “Bobby Frost,” he said. “Worst load of crap he ever wrote. I had to memorize it in grade school.” He picked up his phone. “I’ll call my buddy over at Buildings and Grounds.”
Three days later, the dead bushes outside Palmer Hall had been cleared and a mound of dark, loamy soil had been dumped there, along with some shovels and spades. Dani and Nicolette were outside, along with some other English majors, and Briggs was there too. He and a few of the students were digging and planting while the rest stood around trying to come up with literary songs to sing, like �
��Wuthering Heights” by Kate Bush and “Richard Cory” by Paul Simon. When Briggs chimed in with the boisterous chorus of “Don Quixote” by Gordon Lightfoot, waving his spade in the air, Flynn straightened and stared at him.
When he went inside, he found that Faustino had covered Briggs’s name plate with a handwritten sign: “Chauncey Gardener.”
*
By the time the students came back from summer vacation, Faulkner’s honeysuckle was waist-high and trellised, Marquez’s geraniums were bright with color, Blake’s lilies were tall and elegant, and Millay’s strawberry bushes had fruited and multiplied. When Flynn approached the east entrance of Palmer Hall for his first day of his second year of graduate school, he found some English majors sitting on a stone table near the garden, eating bagels and drinking coffee, and two others on the ground, their bare legs stretched. And—he had to look twice—under the nearby pear tree, his feet bare and the sleeves of his linen shirt rolled up, was Dr. Faustino, absorbed in a book.
*
On the third Monday of October, 1995, James Faustino, who kept the same schedule every semester (office hours Mondays and Wednesdays, classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, Fridays free for meetings), was composing a difficult evaluation of his junior colleague Mary Anne Tscherpel when Flynn rushed in. “Ciao, professore!”
Faustino put down his pen. “Figlio mio,” he said. “How was your class?”