by David Hicks
A girl’s, apparently. They had seen an image of her, milky and alien, during Rachel’s last ultrasound, and the doctor had said, “I don’t see any dots between the legs.” On the way home, Flynn had suggested the name Emily, as in Dickinson—or Emilye, as in “The Knight’s Tale.” He wanted his daughter to be strong, creative, and smart. But Rachel had announced the baby’s name would be Jane.
“Okay, like Jane Eyre,” Flynn had said. “Plain Jane. Or Yeats’s Crazy Jane. Or Springsteen: Crazy Janey and the Mission Man.”
“No, as in that’s my mother’s name.”
Mollie the Collie finished eating, and Flynn interrupted his mail-sorting to let her outside. Rachel had brought home the dog a few years back, over his objections: Nathan was too young, he had said, only eight months old, and the dog might see the baby as competition. When Mollie then nipped Nathan on the cheek, nearly taking off half his face and leaving a red welt, Flynn turned to Rachel with his screaming son in his arms and said “Now see what you’ve done!”
There was one piece of mail for him, from Gayle Cullen of Penn State’s Worthington-Scranton campus. His paper, on Emerson’s influence on the works of Hawthorne, had been accepted for the Hawthorne Society’s annual conference, which was being held in Concord, Massachusetts on May 21st. Enclosed were registration materials and a tentative schedule.
Concord. Flynn closed his eyes, picturing it. The Old Manse. The cemetery. The pond.
As it happened, he was teaching Walden in his Early American Literature class, which satisfied the core Humanities requirement at Fairfield University, but the book was gaining no purchase with his students. Earlier that day, as he read from the second chapter, he felt his left eye twitching and found himself thinking about his morning drive, when he had steeled his way down the Merritt Parkway, smearing back tears. It was the trees that had triggered them, the stooped trees lining the road: a blur of bowed branches, glazed with ice, from a rain storm the night before accompanied by a plunge in temperature. The trees, and all the houses behind them, the thousands and thousands of homes crammed into what was once a thickly wooded paradise. I’m thirty-three years old, he had thought. Why am I crying in the car?
“As long as possible live free and uncommitted,” he read. “It makes but little difference whether you are committed to a farm or the county jail.’”
A hand shot up—Mark Pietrovic, the crystal-eyed baseball star and closet singer-songwriter, majoring in Business. “I don’t know, Hawk,” Mark said, shaking his head. “Maybe back in Nineteen-Whatever you could go out on a piece of land somewhere and live without any commitment, but it’s 2006, man. Those days are long gone.”
“Eighteen-whatever,” Flynn said. He liked Mark, but worried the kid would end up taking over his father’s car parts business instead of doing what he loved. “Forty-six,” he said. “Published 1854.”
Quentin Scirocco, known as “Q,” nodded in agreement with Mark. “Too late for me,” he said. “Un-free, committed up the wazoo. I graduate in three weeks and then I’ll have to get a job to pay off my loans.” He looked around the room. “We’re not here by choice,” he said, making a rapper’s gesture. “It’s indentured servitude, y’all.”
Flynn winced, eyeing Wanda and then Chuck, the two English majors in the class, but Wanda was re-reading the passage, her brow furrowed, and Chuck was texting someone under his desk. The rest of the students seemed mildly disgusted that they had to read such ancient drivel.
Flynn heaved a sigh, clasped his hands, and asked them to take out some paper and pick a sentence, any sentence, from Walden and write a reaction, any reaction, to it. Some students groaned, most playfully, but they all began searching through their books for something to write about.
Flynn looked out the window, at the oaks and maples veneered with ice just as they had begun to bud, at the tulips by the tennis courts, now crushed. He thought of Ron Kruger, his colleague in History, who had recently gone through a divorce and acquired a new girlfriend. Everyone had noticed the change—he practically bounded now when he walked, and had lost weight—but Flynn was waiting for the inevitable collapse. Kruger had not waited, had not figured out what his issues and patterns were, before launching into the next relationship. And as everyone knew, rebounds never worked.
Flynn himself was seeing both a neurologist and a psychologist, although he hadn’t told anyone about the psychologist. He had sought out both six months earlier after nearly wrapping his car around an exit sign on a drive to West Point where he had given a lecture on Edgar Allan Poe. The dizziness that had been visiting him in brief, abrupt waves for months had turned into a full frontal assault, and he could barely keep the car on the road. When it happened again on his way back, he pulled over on the Bear Mountain Bridge and braced for a vehicle to slam into him. After four drivers careened past, one blasting the horn, Flynn put on his hazards, got out, and stepped up onto the steel rim of the bridge. As he stared down at the Hudson River, gauging the distance between his feet and the metallic water, he knew he should think of Nathan, what it would be like for his son to grow up without a father; but all he could focus on was the barge loaded with garbage heading toward him, and then a lone sailboat, soundlessly gliding the other way, toward the city. On the west bank of the river, near the town where Toni Morrison lived, the land was green and fertile. On the east bank, not far from White Plains, there was garbage and dead shrubbery where there had once been trees and high grass. The banks on that side seemed to erode into the river, deteriorating even as Flynn stood, wondering what the impact would be like.
The following semester he adopted a five-day schedule, even though the goal of most of his colleagues was to dwindle their work week down to as few days as possible. (Kruger, for example, had secured a two-day schedule, with a course release for research, and was fast gaining the reputation of an easy grader.) A five-day schedule made Flynn feel like a normal person and a good employee, not a slacker like Kruger. He commuted in the morning like everyone else, complaining mildly about the traffic to the department secretary as he deposited his umbrella in the umbrella stand. When he wasn’t teaching, he could be found at his desk, surrounded by his plants and books, which included a rare first edition of Browning’s Men and Women, a first American edition of Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground, and five years’ worth of American Literature and American Literary Quarterly, among other essential journals. On his walls hung a poster of a waterfall (with the inscription “In Wildness is the Salvation of the World”); a facsimile daguerreotype of Ralph Waldo Emerson; a print of a William Blake etching depicting the somewhat violent creation of the world, and his plaque for Outstanding Faculty Member, 2004-2005. On his desk was a framed picture of his son playing in a sandbox (Nathan holding the back end of a truck, his forehead furrowed) and a large crystal from MacNair Richards, a student who had graduated two years earlier and traveled extensively—waiting tables in Prague, teaching English in Japan, and working as a ski instructor in the Colorado mountains. He had found the crystal after the Commencement ceremony on his desk, with a note: From Alaska, where I spent last summer. Thanks for everything, the beautiful and kind Flynn Hawkins. Flynn had picked up the crystal, felt the weight of it, and put it back where MacNair had set it. It had stayed there ever since.
Flynn, who wore mostly tweed, corduroy, or herringbone jackets with button-collared shirts and Eddie Bauer chinos, was what some might consider handsome, with a high forehead, wavy brown hair, a well-trimmed moustache, and a face that reminded people of someone else: a cousin, an old high-school friend, or an actor (Matthew Perry, or a skinny John Travolta). He had never had an affair with a student—in fact he was the chair of the Ad-Hoc Committee on Sexual Harassment and a member of the Women’s Studies Advisory Board—but occasionally he caught a female student’s eye, complimented her hair or an attractive item of clothing, then looked away, as if he’d meant nothing untoward or lascivious by the remark.
&n
bsp; Now that he thought about it, he had never had a nine-to-five schedule before. When he was first hired at Fairfield, Nathan was a newborn and Flynn was finishing his dissertation, so his department chair had kindly given him an evenings-and-weekends teaching schedule so he could spend his weekdays at home (feeding and changing Nathan, taking him to the park and supermarket, driving him around with a Motown CD on until he fell asleep, sneaking in revisions of his last three chapters) until four p.m., when he would get ready to go to work—glancing out the window as he changed Nathan’s diaper, looking up at the clock after squeezing a drop of antibiotics into his son’s clamped mouth, scribbling a note to Rachel about what was in the fridge to warm up for dinner. If she was late, he’d imagine her barreling down the Bronx River Parkway in her red Pathfinder and getting into a terrible accident; he’d imagine being sad at her funeral. He’d imagine quitting his job, selling the house, and moving with Nathan to someplace quiet, a place where they could live simply and front all the essentials of life.
That’s when his migraines had intensified. They were accompanied not only by a sickening discomfort and nausea, but also by pain so penetrating that he longed to decapitate himself. His neurologist told him they were caused by a combination of stress, irregular sleep, dehydration, bad eating habits, and caffeine, and he needed to completely change his lifestyle; but who could do such a thing? His students needed him. Rachel needed him. His son needed him. After his evening class he would come home, bathe Nathan, read him a story, and put him to bed, then do the dishes, straighten up the family room, join Rachel in the bedroom to watch a TV show and hear about her day, then grab the baby monitor and go up to the attic, where he would grade papers or work on his dissertation until he fell asleep with his head on his desk, only to wake up at the first squawking cry to warm up Nathan’s bottle.
In the fall, when their daughter was born, he would give up his five-day schedule and return to teaching evenings and weekends, return to caring for an infant. Only for another couple of years, until she too was ready for preschool. He could handle it. So many people had gone through so much worse, raising children with no steady income and nothing like tenure, which Flynn was sure to get when he applied next year. Who was he to complain? He had a good job, a beautiful son, and a wife with bright green eyes, a fit body, and a boisterous personality everyone was drawn to. He just needed to drink more water, regulate his caffeine intake, and he’d be fine.
Quentin’s hand was up. “Any passage at all, right?”
Flynn nodded, pretending to notice another student’s hand—Audrey’s—too late. “Q” cleared his throat and read the passage about how Thoreau went to the woods to live deliberately, to “live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.’”
“Okay,” Q said, “so this is telling us we should all live close to the bone, right? Austere. But I’m also thinking it means we need to party hard, you know? Carpe diem.” He made the rapper’s gesture again.
Flynn shook his head. Q was a sweet kid, but he hadn’t read a single line of a single book the entire semester. “He is talking about seizing the day,” Flynn said. “But not in that way.” He folded his arms and glanced outside again, where a Physical Plant worker was bent over the crushed tulips. “You can too,” he said. “Even in college. Even in Connecticut. I mean, you don’t have to wait until you graduate to live every day deliberately, to make the most of your short life.” He looked out beyond the vast and well-manicured campus lawn toward the once-sleepy seaside hamlet of Fairfield, now cluttered with mansions and quaint shopping plazas in the second-most crowded state in the Union, and beyond that the decaying docks jutting out into Long Island Sound, murky, seaweed-strewn, and polluted. An image came to him, of MacNair Richards swimming in a river somewhere in the mountains of Colorado, then stepping out of the water and up onto the rocky shore, the clear water streaming from her auburn hair, rushing over her breasts and down her muscular thighs.
“Mine’s on the same page,” Audrey said, still with her hand up. Flynn nodded, bracing himself.
“‘Our life is frittered away by detail’,” she read. “‘An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!’”
Audrey slapped her palm on the book. “I mean, shut up, Henry! If you want to live like this, that’s your problem! I need my iPad. I need my iPhone. I need my car to get to school. I like wearing nice clothes.” She looked around, but the other students were ignoring her.
Wanda’s hand went up next. “Mine’s on eighty-five,” she said. She waited for everyone to get to that page before reading Thoreau’s boast that only once during his two-year stay in the woods had he felt lonely; but then a gentle rain had made him aware of a “sustaining congeniality” in the atmosphere that “made the fancied advantages of human society insignificant,” and he never felt lonely again.
Wanda looked up. “I wrote that this feels sad. The fancied advantages of human society?” She tilted her head like a puppy. “What I was wondering is, did Thoreau have any friends?” She leaned forward and opened her palms. “Did he ever fall in love?”
Flynn pictured Thoreau, “long-nosed, queer-mouthed, and ugly as sin,” as Hawthorne called him, walking into town every day, eating a piece of his aunt’s apple pie, picking up a newspaper, ice-skating on the Concord River, chatting with the locals at the general store—all the things he left out of his book. He shrugged at Wanda. Some of this is pure bullshit, he wanted to say. “He needed to be on his own,” he said instead. “He needed to figure things out.” He looked at the slumped students in the back row. “So do all of you,” he said, his voice rising a bit. “Instead of just, you know, jumping into a career at age twenty-two and getting married at twenty-four like it’s some kind of government mandate. You should get your act together first, right?” He scanned the room: his students looked mildly alarmed.
He softened his voice. “The truth is,” he said to Wanda, “we don’t know if Thoreau ever had sex, or if he was ever in love.” Wanda frowned, and Flynn wondered who he had meant by we. We the members of the Thoreau Society? We the biographers who pore over the journals and letters of 19th Century writers and philosophers who wrote in an age when people didn’t talk about sex, didn’t confess to erotic urges, would set down with minute care the measurements of a pond but who wouldn’t come within twenty hectares of disclosing the true measure of their longings?
He took a breath. Wanda—bright-eyed, smart, kindhearted—was the kind of girl Flynn hoped his unborn daughter would grow up to be. “Truth is, he wasn’t good at sustaining intimate relationships,” he said. “Neither was Emerson, for that matter.”
Chuck looked up from his phone. “Emerson?” he said. “I thought Emerson had it all, the way you talked about him: wife, kids, good friends, upstanding member of the community.” Chuck grinned. “Like you!”
Flynn grimaced. “Don’t be deceived by appearances,” he said. He thought of Emerson’s fondness for intelligent single women like Caroline Sturgis, Elizabeth Peabody, and Margaret Fuller, at the anger those women may have felt about the mixed messages they received from the Great Original Thinker. Emerson played with words, cast kindling smiles, but when push came to shove he waxed eloquent on the nobility of friendship, caressed these women with his liquid voice, then hid behind his words.
“Emerson’s wife wasn’t very happy,” he said, still waiting for the next volunteer. “His true love had died tragically, and he married Lidian out of convenience.” He tapped his copy of Walden, thinking of two strong, dark-eyed women he had known during grad school. He must have lacked then whatever it was that was required—courage, self-confidence, forthrightness—to be himself, whatever that meant, with either one. To fully assert himself. To claim love rather than hope for it. One of them, a girl named Rosa, had certainly deserved better.
“You never marry your true love,” he
muttered.
His students were now staring at him.
Flynn opened his book to one of the pages he had marked with a paper clip. “Let’s jump to the end for a minute,” he said. “Page 209, bottom paragraph.”
As his students flipped wearily to the page, Audrey sat back and folded her arms.
“‘If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams,” Flynn read, “and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. . . . In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex. . . . If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.’”
Flynn shut his book. “You have to give him that, at least,” he said. “If you live according to your ideals and not what someone else says your goals should be, you’ll feel good about yourself and other things will fall into place, even though there will be suffering, or consequences—people, like your family, will be mad at you . . .” He took off his glasses and ran his hand through his hair. “I mean, I know a lot of you have your lives all mapped out, but . . . listen, you need to know this: nothing ever goes according to plan. We get married to the wrong people, we find whatever jobs we can to make money, then figure out ways to enjoy our lives apart from that, like on weekends or vacations . . . and meanwhile we’re not happy on a daily basis, we don’t live the way we want to—I mean, look at you guys, you’ve all been medicated out of your depressions instead of confronting what you’re really sad about, and you’re still not happy, you’re numb, you’re just trying to—to steal it, happiness, instead of earning it, and then, you know, you stare at your cell phones while the world goes to shit, you major in Business because you want to make money even though you know that’s not what makes you happy, I mean there are studies . . .” He was starting to sweat, thinking frantically. “And then we end up dying, all disappointed, wishing we hadn’t . . .” He tapped the book in his hand. “So, you know, why don’t you figure out not what you want to do, but who you want to be, and conform your lives, your decisions, to that? Why do we do it the other way around, conforming to our stupid, mundane lives?” Flynn waved at the blackboard, thinking he had put some key expressions on it, but that was in a previous class and he was waving at nothing.