by David Hicks
“Good. So, registration begins tomorrow, right?”
Faustino nodded; he had been conferencing with his advisees all week and couldn’t wait for registration to be over.
“And I’m graduating at the end of next semester,” Flynn said. He seemed a little out of breath.
“Yes, provided you pass your classes and the MA exam,” Faustino said, his voice sounding a bit more gruff than he had intended. “Is there a point, son?”
“The point,” Flynn said, holding up the Spring 1996 course-selection booklet, “is that you’re not teaching a graduate course. In my final semester here.”
Faustino scratched his beard. He had last taught a graduate course, on American Modernist Poetry, during Flynn’s first semester. “We all take turns,” he said. “There’s a rotation. In your two years here, you take each of us at least once. Twelve faculty members, three courses per semester, four semesters.”
“Well, right,” Flynn said, opening the booklet to the English page, “but here’s Tscherpel teaching a class on people I never heard of, which is fine of course, but I already took her for Restoration Drama, my first semester.”
Faustino nodded. “That’s because Dr. Slowick will be on sabbatical in the spring.”
Flynn lifted his head to the heavens, then dropped his chin to his chest. “Okay that’s not the point,” he said. “Here’s the point. Let me just put it out there. You’re this great Hemingway scholar, you studied with Phil Young, your nickname is Papa, you used to be a boxer, et cetera et cetera.”
Faustino placed his right hand on the desk, in the dismissal position, and wondered if he should tell the kid the truth, which was that he had never boxed, but he had once joked to a student that he had almost qualified for the Olympics, and once that legend was born, he had done nothing to dispute it.
Flynn flung himself into the student chair—a move he had developed to counter what he called the Faustinian Finger Flip. “So in an ideal world,” he said. “I mean, if I could have one wish . . . you know, before I leave here . . .” He clasped his hands together. “It would be to study Hemingway with you.”
“Ah,” Faustino said. “Well thank you. But, you know. That’s life.” He smiled thinly, but as he did so, he had an idea. Nonetheless, he flicked out his two fingers. “Off you go now, son.”
The following Monday, as Faustino left the building on his way to a Core Curriculum meeting, he saw Flynn chatting with some undergrads on his way back from class. He called out and Flynn jogged over, holding his satchel to prevent it from flapping.
Faustino opened his bag and handed Hawkins a completed Independent Study form for Spring 1996. Next to “Course Title” he had written, “Hemingway.”
“Sign this and bring it to the Registrar,” he said. “You can drop Dr. Tscherpel’s course. I’ve already spoken to her about it.”
Faustino started to walk away, but Flynn put a hand on his arm. “You spoke to her about it?”
“Yes,” Faustino said. Again with the echoing! “Oh, and I was thinking we’d have it at my house.”
Flynn gaped open his mouth. “At your house?”
“Yes! My house.” Faustino turned and walked away, thinking of replacing the course title with something like Echo and Faustissus, or Echo-Roman Wrestling, or Echo and the Funny Man. He continued on towards Bateman Hall where he would sit for two hours daydreaming about the Yankees’ chances in the playoffs and worrying about Joanna, who, after months without much pain (except for a consistent backache), had doubled over in pain that morning and had finally agreed to make an appointment with her gynecologist.
*
Three months later, on the third Thursday evening of January 1996, at 5:45 p.m., Flynn set off on the fourteen-block walk from 17 Younger Drive to 105 St. Anne Street. It was damp and cold, and as he tramped through the hardened snow the sky deepened to black. He was greeted at the door by Faustino’s wife, a corpulent woman with gray-blonde hair and moist blue eyes. “Jim hasn’t done this for years!” she said as she led Flynn to an armchair, scurried into the kitchen, came out with a tray of finger sandwiches and a glass of soda, and set them on the coffee table. “Did you eat dinner, sweetheart?”
Flynn stared at her. She was so . . . maternal. He scanned the living room for photos of children, but remembered that at the English Department Christmas party, Slowick had told him, his voice confidential, that the Faustinos had never been able to conceive. It was, Slowick said, the unspoken tragedy of their lives.
When Faustino came lumbering down the stairs, Mrs. Faustino seemed to vanish, and Flynn and his professor sat opposite each other in the living room. Faustino began by chatting about Hemingway’s life, focusing on the author’s boyhood, and they proceeded to discuss a few of the Nick Adams stories Flynn had been assigned, including “Indian Camp,” which ends with a man killing himself during his wife’s violent childbirth and Nick’s father, a doctor, saying, “He couldn’t stand things, I guess.” They talked for two hours straight. When Mrs. Faustino quietly re-entered the room, replacing the sandwich tray with a plate of cookies and a mug of tea, Flynn met her eyes (such kindness!) and smiled a thank-you.
“Shouldn’t the young man be allowed to take a break?” she asked Faustino. “What if he needs to go to the bathroom, for heaven’s sake?” When Faustino gave her what seemed the marital equivalent of the finger flip, she scowled and held out the tray. “I’m giving you the finger right now,” she said, “even though you can’t see it.” Then she winked at Flynn and laughed. “I’ve never done that before!”
As Faustino dropped the book to his lap and raised his eyes to the ceiling, Flynn picked up a raspberry-thumbprint cookie and popped it in his mouth. “You have as many as you want, dear,” she said as she left the room. “There’s plenty more.” Then Flynn had to stare at his Collected Stories of Ernest Hemingway so his professor wouldn’t see his eyes well up. Nobody—not his mother, not any of his aunts (nasal-voiced, reedy Bronx women who overcooked their meals and communicated via sarcasm and clichés)—had ever spoken to him as this woman had.
When he looked up, Faustino was staring at the kitchen door. “She’s a piece of work,” he muttered. Then he scratched his beard and looked down at his book.
For the next month, Mrs. Faustino had dinner waiting when Flynn arrived: eggplant parmigiana with a side of braciole and salad; penne pasta with pesto and chunks of mozzarella and sausage; flank steak with mushrooms and macaroni-and-cheese; a roasted chicken with carrots and potatoes. But on the first Thursday of March, she was nowhere in sight. “My beloved is indisposed,” Faustino said as he opened the front door. He pointed upstairs. “She said to help yourself to whatever you’d like in the fridge. Can I warm up some lasagna for you?”
“No thanks,” Flynn said, even though he was hungry. The idea of his esteemed professor preparing food for him seemed inappropriate. He glanced upstairs, hoping Mrs. Faustino would appear after all, but everything was quiet.
They sat down to discuss “Fathers and Sons,” which Faustino called “Quite possibly the best short story ever written,” to which Flynn replied, “Quite possibly an overstatement?” and instead of emitting a deep chuckle, Faustino frowned.
“Quite possibly not,” he said.
“Better than ‘Rip Van Winkle’?” Flynn offered.
Faustino snorted. “I’m talking stories, this guy gives me a fairy tale.”
‘“Young Goodman Brown’?”
The professor shook his head. “Too heavy-handed.”
‘“Life in the Iron Mills?’ ‘Bartleby, the Scrivener’?” In the preceding semester he had taken a course in 19th Century American Literature and had loved all the symbolism.
Another snort from his professor. “What are you, a socialist?”
“How about ‘The Dead’?” Flynn had also enjoyed a course on the Irish Renaissance—such bleak portrayals of the human condition balan
ced by a perpetual impulse towards humor. The Irish treated a joke as a serious thing and serious things as a joke, according to a character in one of the plays he’d read, and Flynn had felt himself missing the grit and sarcasm of New Yorkers. He was still in New York State, but here in Madisonville, six hours away, it was a completely different part of the country.
Faustino shook his head. “Best ending ever,” he said, “but too much dilly-dallying beforehand.”
Flynn smiled, thinking of what his other professor would say to that. “How about ‘The Shawl?”
“Ooo,” Faustino said. “Good one. Top Ten.”
Flynn snapped his fingers. “‘Beast in the Jungle’.”
Faustino pursed his lips. “Christ,” he said. “You might have me there.”
After they discussed “Fathers and Sons,” also based on Hemingway’s relationship with his father, Faustino asked Flynn to read the final dialogue out loud. Flynn did so, his voice softening as he imagined himself as the boy in the passenger seat watching his father drive with a cigarette between his lips. When Flynn came to the part where Nick brags about his late father’s sharpshooting skills and his son says, “I bet he wasn’t better than you,” Faustino suddenly closed his eyes and folded his meaty hands over his belly.
‘“Oh, yes he was,’” Faustino said, quoting the story’s next lines. “‘He shot very quickly and beautifully. I’d rather see him shoot than any man I ever knew. He was always disappointed in the way I shot.”’ He kept his eyes closed, then suddenly wiped them with his fists.
He cleared his throat and grabbed a napkin. “Gets me every time,” he said.
Flynn sat still, not knowing what to say. He hadn’t been nearly as moved by the story when he had read it the night before. “Should I continue?” he asked.
Faustino removed the napkin from his face, which was now ruddy, and shook his head.
“I’m sorry,” Flynn said, remembering what Dr. Slowick had told him. “Is it because you always wanted . . .”
Faustino cut him off with his hand. “My father passed away,” he said. “Christmas Eve.. He was eighty-nine. But still.”
Flynn shifted in his armchair. “Shit,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
On the mantle behind his professor was a black-and-white photograph of a couple. The man had broad shoulders, mutton chops, and a whale-shaped torso. “Is that him?” Flynn asked, pointing to it.
Faustino nodded, then blew his nose.
“Handsome man,” Flynn said, even though the man wasn’t especially handsome. He bounced his palms on the arms of the seat. He wanted to say something like Well, at least you had your old man around as long as you did, but he supposed the pain must be the same—or maybe worse, because with more years there would be more memories, more time to screw up the relationship and regret what you never said to him.
“And yes,” Faustino said, picking up his book and thumbing the pages. “Yes I always wanted a son. Okay? Now then. Next story.”
*
From mid-March to the end of the month, the weather thawed, then chilled, then turned outright offensive before thawing again. Then it snowed for four straight days. On Sunday, March 31, 1996, Flynn stared out the kitchen window, which overlooked the yard where Baby sulked in his doghouse, his fur matted. The doghouse was surrounded by stacks of rotting firewood, piles of bricks, three car tires, sheets of roof shingles, various auto parts, waterlogged boxes of old tiles, and cinder blocks. Flynn watched as the snowflakes splattered the doghouse roof and the trees dropped clumps onto the ground still patched by November’s sooty snow. The branch of a crabapple tree bent perilously over the stretch of mud where Baby, in nice weather, would run back and forth, hooked to his chain.
One flake after another, without much accumulation or grace. Flynn watched the snow galumphing down from the gray heavens, attempting to reinterpret it as beautiful, as a pastoral cascade, but there was nothing attractive about it.
At that moment, James Faustino was in the waiting room of WCA Hospital, five miles from Flynn’s house. The pap smear at the gynecologist’s office had revealed nothing, but Joanna’s back pain had persisted, so now she was undergoing an MRI. If they found “anything weird,” they would do a biopsy right away. Faustino fingered the book he had brought with him (Winesburg, Ohio), but instead found himself staring out the window at the pathetic snowfall, a cantankerous and insistent blight determined to obstruct for an infuriating length of time the onset of spring, the inevitable return of his wife’s health and vigor.
There had been a time, in his forties, when Faustino had fantasized about his wife’s death. He would have been freed to explore his options in a way he never had in his youth. He was still a large man then, but more “big” and “broad-shouldered” than obese. He had been finding Joanna’s matronly personality—her fussing over their cats, her cooing over their friends’ and family members’ children—a constant irritant. Her lilting, caressing voice, the very voice he had found charming during their courtship, had struck him as phony; he mocked it privately at first, then out loud on occasion, and finally, once, in public. The night he did so, they drove home afterwards in silence, and once they stepped inside their house, Joanna turned and smacked Faustino across the face. She tried to say something, her face scrunched and red, but it never came out. Instead she turned, went upstairs, and locked the door to their bedroom. Lying on the couch that night, Faustino realized how mean he had been, and vowed to treat her from that day forward with the respect she certainly merited. The fifteen years since had been a steadily enhanced period of kindness and camaraderie, along with a burgeoning patience, fastidiousness, and prudence he at once disdained and appreciated. He was a better person now than when they were first married, and he had learned to treat his wife with gratitude and compassion. That was enough. And the love he received in return, the tenderness, in such abundance, was beyond what he either deserved or expected.
Now, he at sixty, she at sixty-one, he was in no mood to imagine what his life might be like without her.
Back at 17 Younger Drive, Flynn Hawkins put his hand on the cold window, feeling a slight draft through the rotting frame. He had not gone home for spring break, as he had planned. He had spent the week reading on the couch, drinking tea, and recovering from the flu. And he had received a letter from NYU, accepting him into their PhD program, with a full scholarship and teaching assistantship. So things were going well. All things considered, it had been good to spend the last two years, excepting his sister’s wedding and a few holiday visits, away from White Plains. He had done okay on his own. Rent would be much higher in Manhattan, but he could take out another student loan and try to sublet a rent-controlled place in the Village. Then, when he became a professor, he would make a real salary and start paying off his loans. It was all going to work out. In the back of his mind, he knew he should think more about it—he should decide whether or not this was what he actually wanted to do with his life—but he told himself he was on track, and it would be a good life.
*
Eleven days later, when Flynn arrived at the Faustinos’ house, it was quiet inside, and the living room smelled stuffy. He hadn’t been there in three weeks—first due to spring break, then because Faustino had canceled (without explanation) the following week. Mrs. Faustino was nowhere in sight.
Faustino went into the kitchen, microwaved a Pyrex container full of baked ziti, and brought out two plates. Flynn thanked him, then ate quietly as his professor took a seat at the table, opened his copy of A Farewell to Arms, and took a bite of his food. Faustino always wrote his favorite line of a book on its title page, and typically he read it to Flynn as a way of starting their conversation, but this time he stared at the page while eating. Flynn tried to read the line upside-down.
‘“The world breaks everyone,’” Faustino finally read, ‘“and afterward many are strong at the broken places.’”
Flynn sat b
ack. He had liked that line when he read it, but now it felt different. “Don’t some people stay broken?” he asked. “Or pretend they’re stronger but never get there? Like a bone that mends the wrong way? Or something?”
Faustino huffed while chewing his food—“Or something?” he muttered—then took a gulp of Bud Lite. “And what, may I ask, do you know about being broken? You’re what, twenty-three?” He lowered his head and chewed like a rhinoceros.
“Twenty-four,” Flynn said.
Faustino reached for the grated cheese. “Let’s have this talk again when you’re fifty,” he said.
*
The following week, Faustino came home from the hospital just in time to open a bag of pretzels and order a pizza. The doorbell rang as he hung up the phone. He took a deep breath, then opened the door for Flynn. As he went into the kitchen to get a couple of beers, he noticed the kid looking around, then up the staircase. “I hope you like pepperoni,” he called out. When he came back, Flynn was still standing by the table, and for a moment Faustino considered telling him about what he had just seen: his wife, blanching first at what the oncologist had told them, then again at the “chemo plan” that would begin immediately. Faustino had held her hand, feeling her grip fade at first, then tighten fiercely, just as it had during their wedding, at the little church where she had served as acolyte and lector. She hadn’t let go of his hand for the entire service, not even when they kneeled, her nails occasionally digging into his palm. When he had bent to kiss his bride, she had squeezed even harder and hissed into his ear, “Now don’t you ever, ever leave me.”
Faustino handed Flynn a beer, told him the pizza was on its way, then settled the mass of his body into his armchair and picked up his copy of For Whom the Bell Tolls. “Let’s get right to it,” he said. “No small talk.” And he opened the book as a monsignor would open the Bible.