McGhan looked as if he were going to say something heated to Dorothy, but after a couple of seconds of silence during which she regarded him with a politely inquiring look and one eyebrow raised he shrugged it off. “Now where the hell was I?” he said. “Oh, yes, about our boy here; it seems that a good many of my colleagues regard him as a curious phenomenon. From what Getz said—and he was speaking on behalf of several others—Mr. Egan starts each semester sitting in the front row right under the instructor’s nose and with a look of intense interest on his face, then in a month or so turns up in a middle row with a look of repugnance on said face, and eventually appears in a back row where he sleeps through class behind a pair of dark glasses. Finally, and most pleasantly for the instructor, he disappears altogether like the dew on tender buds when the sun is high. Some held that like the dew Mr. Egan is drawn up into the heavens at these times, ready to be freshly discharged on the heads of luckless instructors when the rains of the new semester commence. Others say no, that having tried his mentors and found them wanting Mr. Egan has rejoined the gods on Olympus to refresh himself briefly. Whatever the theories, there seems to be one underlying note they share. Mr. Egan is apparently a stiff pain in the ass to those who would impart wisdom to him.”
“Does that include you?” I asked. I hadn’t had anything to eat since breakfast, and now I could feel the drink—little as there had been of it—working on me. The symptoms were interesting and familiar. A second Daniel Egan had detached himself from me and was watching me as I sat there on the kitchen table swinging one leg, smiling, talking in a restrained voice, being terribly poised. He was watching me, knowing that I was resentful and scared and ravenously hungry, and he was amused by it. And behind him was a third Daniel Egan thinking his own thoughts and making his own judgments, one of which was that the second Egan wasn’t as smart as he thought he was. And so on through a whole series of Egans like the infinite series of images in two mirrors facing each other, each one a perfect representation of me, and yet each one considering me and all the others from a different viewpoint.
I didn’t need a martini on an empty stomach to get that effect, although it helped. Sometimes, by concentrating hard enough I could get it through sheer will power, by mentally driving through the self that spoke and acted for me, until I was lost in that endless series wondering which was the real self, not so sure any longer that the real self was merely the total of the series. That instant of not being sure was like stepping suddenly into emptiness. There was exhilaration and terror in the realization that at the bottom of emptiness was truth. Truth in general and truth about myself in particular. But it never lasted more than an instant, it would all dissolve into the original Egan alone, the one that spoke and acted for me and kept digging my pitfalls.
It happened that way when I said to McGhan, “Does that include you?” and McGhan said, “No, it doesn’t,” and it was all gone. One martini, one chance to see Truth. Two martinis, and it didn’t matter very much whether I saw it or not. I took the milk bottle, poured myself another drink, and McGhan took the bottle from my hand and put it down.
“I said it doesn’t,” he told me, “and I don’t expect you to get on the train tanked up, so your father can charge me with corrupting you. As for the way some of the faculty feel about you, they’re justified. They take enough crap from the world at large. They’re hardly eager to take more of it from the self-satisfied brats they’re supposed to educate.”
“They’re mighty touchy,” I said.
“Sure, they’re mighty touchy. At least the ones with pride are. The worst thing that ever happened to education was the way it got tied into civil service, because everybody knows that the man who signs up for civil service is just castrating himself, he’s cutting it off and throwing it away. The whole male dream of deeds to do, worlds to conquer, pot of gold to find at the end of the rainbow—all of that cut off and tossed on the midden heap. That’s what civil service means to the worldly, and when teaching became identified with it that’s what teaching came to mean. Don’t tell me you haven’t ever thought that if a man had any guts he wouldn’t be here grading examination papers.”
“I never thought it about you,” I said.
“You thought it about plenty of others. And wherever you transfer to for your last year you’ll think it about the faculty there. That’s a sad thing to have to say to anyone with some pretensions to culture, but it’s been waiting to be said to you for a couple of years now.”
“Except for one thing,” I said. “I’m not transferring any place for my last year. I’ve had it.”
McGhan looked surprised. “Oh?” he said, and Dorothy said, “Do you really mean that?”
“Yes.”
“Does your father know about it yet?” she asked. I had once made the mistake during a Homecoming Week of inviting my father to the McGhans for an evening of talk and musical glasses, and neither Dorothy nor my father had ever completely recovered from the experience. I knew what she was thinking.
I said: “No, I want to wait awhile before I tell him. If I do it right now he’d think it was because of what happened to Ben.”
“Well, isn’t it because of what happened to Ben?” McGhan said.
“No.”
“Ah,” said McGhan, “don’t give me that, boy. You’re running from the ghost of Ben Gennaro, that’s what you’re doing. But how do you know it’s strictly a collegiate ghost? How do you know it won’t turn up wherever you are? Right now Gennaro’s in all the papers, but when they forget about him he’ll still be in you. He’ll be right inside you like the worm i’ the bud. Why not act with some common sense now and exorcise his miserable spirit once and for all? He never was worth all you gave him.”
He had always disliked Ben. He had once said to me, “It’s enough that I have to see him in class; don’t bring him around here any more. I don’t like to be condescended to by anyone, even if it happens to be the stud who won the war single-handed and is sheer genius at football. And I don’t like the way he looks at Dorothy.” And another time he had said, “I’d have to be pretty stupid not to know that you’re doing all of Gennaro’s English papers for him. For all I care you can keep right on doing them, you’ll get that much more practice in writing. But I hope he or the Iobacchoi boys are paying you a fair price for your work. I hate to see any writer get screwed out of his profits.”
So there would be no de mortuis for Ben from him. Well, it hadn’t been expected, so it didn’t hurt. What hurt was this conception that Ben Gennaro, alive or dead, was somehow in charge of me.
I said: “The reason I’m not going to work for a degree is that I’m fed up. If you want my exact opinions on college education you can ask Dr. Sprague for them. I gave them to him in detail at the farewell ceremonies this afternoon.”
“You must have made quite an impression,” McGhan said. “If he had any doubts about the case I’ll bet you took care of them beautifully.”
“I’ll bet I did.”
“And you mean that Gennaro’s name never happened to come into the conversation? Or the way you stood as amicus usque ad aras to him?”
McGhan had used that tag on me before, and I knew well enough what it meant to feel it was the depth of venomous bad taste now. But it was like McGhan to call me a friend to the point of self-immolation when I was sitting there drinking his liquor and obviously not self-immolated. I should have been, but I wasn’t.
I said: “Ben’s name came into the conversation quite a few times, and every time it did Dr. Sprague pointed out that I wasn’t to feel responsible for what had happened. The third or fourth time you hear that you begin to wonder.”
McGhan cocked his head at me. “Maybe too much?”
“Maybe.”
He refilled his cup but didn’t drink. He just sat there turning the cup around and around in his hand and studying it. Then he said: “The Greeks had a word for it, all right. The hero had to have enormous strength, inhuman courage, and the virility of a goat.
He had to eat, drink, fight, and copulate, and never get winded, and I suppose that as long as it was a case of man with his two fists and bare cojones against the whole brutal world it made some sense. It made sense for Gennaro, anyhow, even though the world was never quite the place he thought it was. But once the poets and philosophers moved in—Have you ever heard the Aegean legend about the Crucifixion? The one about the phrase Ho megas Pan tethnekai?”
“No.”
McGhan continued to turn the cup around and around, watching it abstractedly. “Well, you ought to look it up,” he said at last. “It’s quite interesting.”
Dorothy yawned. “I’d better start getting dinner ready,” she said. “There’s some people coming.”
McGhan looked at her. “What people?”
“The same as usual people, dear. You ought to know, you’re the one who invited them.” She went to the sink and looked dispiritedly at the dishes in it. “If you’re eating with us, Danny, grab a towel and lend a hand.”
I took a towel and dried the dishes as she washed them. Every time I carried a few across the kitchen to stack on the table I had to be careful not to step on Enid, who was curled up sound asleep on the floor, her thumb in her mouth. After a while McGhan took notice of this. He picked up Enid and sat down with her still asleep on his lap.
“What kind of career are you looking forward to without a degree?” he asked me.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I haven’t given it much thought.”
“Well, you’d better give it some thought pretty soon. You are of the generation, Danny boy, where a degree may not certify its owner’s intelligence, integrity, or ambition, but it does have a magic power to open the right doors. Unless you plan on getting a job in your father’s company.”
“Not if he offered it on a silver platter.”
“If he offered it.”
“He wants me to work there,” I said. “Do you think I should?”
“Yes.”
That surprised me. “Are you serious?”
“Of course, I’m serious. What the hell, boy, you don’t think I’ve got scruples against a good sensible policy like nepotism, do you? And in your spot what else would you suggest? I don’t see you as one of those doe-eyed eunuchs who work as salesmen in Fifth Avenue book shops, or as the kind of eager beaver who peddles brooms from door to door. And if you’ve got any ideas of making a living by writing—”
“Which I don’t.”
“I was pretty sure you didn’t. It would have been a little dismaying to find that I had yet another dolt on my hands who mistook a love for reading as a talent for writing. I’m glad to get your assurance on that, Danny boy. It indicates that there is a golden vein of common sense beneath that tarnished halo. How about applying it to some cold consideration of your prospects.”
I didn’t like being condescended to any more than he did. I said, “What prospects? My father and my uncle own that business, a couple of cousins and my sister’s boy friend help run it, and as far as they’re all concerned I’m a dud. A dead loss. You’ve met my father, you ought to know what it would be like working for him. And what the hell do I care about exporting and importing, anyhow? I’d rather dig ditches.”
“Oh, you will,” said McGhan. “You will.”
“All right, I will. At least I’d be able to come home feeling I did an honest day’s work. And I’d be tired enough to get a good night’s sleep out of it, instead of lying awake like the rest of my family, wondering how to knife my uncles when they’re not looking, or the income tax people, or some customer.”
“Jesus, what a romantic,” said McGhan. “I didn’t know there were any more like you left in this day and age. You sound like a combination of John Ruskin and Henry Thoreau and both of them gassed to the ears.”
“I wonder why,” Dorothy remarked to him. “It seems to me I’ve heard a lot of that talk around here.”
“Only when I was in my cups,” McGhan said. “And only when I was feeling a little more fragmented than I could tolerate. What the hell, I never denied that anyone dealing with ideas and words and figures is away from basic reality. Naturally, he is. He’s dealing with symbols, not with physical objects that he takes into his hand and manipulates. If you look at it that way, a plumber or carpenter is bound to be a better-integrated personality than his so-called white-collared superior. But not a ditchdigger, for God’s sake. I’ve dug ditches in my time, and that’s really getting down to the animal level.”
“All right,” said Dorothy, “then how about giving up your job and becoming a plumber? This town could use quite a few plumbers. You ought to be able to make a fortune in no time.”
“Ah,” said McGhan, “but I also believe in man’s need to exercise his fullest capacities, even if it means straining his milk a little. The trouble with Danny here is that he won’t put out, and that is something I attribute to his late friend Gennaro.”
I said, “I wish you’d leave Ben out of it.”
“I wish I could, but it’s rank superstition to imagine that you can dispose of a hero by refusing to name him. And I hope you’re not such a fool as to deny the influence Gennaro had on you. The trouble is, Danny, that the ordinary man isn’t properly equipped to simulate his hero. Gennaro was the ravisher and lion-killer; he could get away with his brand of scorn for the world and its works, but you can’t. Oh, what the hell, have another drink and forget it. Go be a carpenter, go be a plumber, and then come around some day and do a job on the house. That is, if your rates are reasonable.”
The evening was the same as a good many other evenings I had spent with the McGhans. There were half a dozen faculty members and their wives on hand, a buffet of odds and ends that Dorothy threw together at the last minute, and some steady drinking by all. As usual, the men gravitated to one side of the room and the women to the other, one side discussing literature and faculty gossip and the other side babies. None of it meant very much to me any more. I sat in a corner, carried glasses back and forth from the kitchen, went upstairs at Dorothy’s request to see if Heather was running around barefooted, and thought my own thoughts.
The train to New York left at eleven forty, but long before that I knew that I wouldn’t be on it. I had enough money to carry me for about a week away from home; I came to the conclusion that the best thing to do was take the midnight train to Philadelphia and ride out the worst of the family storm from a distance. When I took my suitcase out of Median’s room and said good-bye to Dorothy she said, “Wait a minute. You’ll never get a cab around here at this hour; I’ll have Lyle drive you down to the station,” and then when she looked across the room at McGhan she said, “No, he’s not doing any driving tonight,” and went out with me and took me down to the station herself.
Neither of us spoke a word along the way, and after Dorothy had parked the car next to the station we sat there in silence. It was a warm, still night, and the single pale light over the empty station platform barely tempered the darkness around us. The light glinted on the railroad tracks in front of the car, and it came on me that at the very moment I would be heading in one direction on those tracks, Ben’s body would be rushing along in another, and yet no matter how far apart we were pulled, the cord between us couldn’t be broken. Not as long as I wanted Mia Gennaro, and had to see her and be with her.
Then the headlight of the train came slicing through the darkness from a distance, and Dorothy suddenly said, “Will we be seeing you again, Danny?”
“I hope so,” I said. “If I’m ever around here again you can count on it.”
Then she said surprisingly, “If not, maybe I’ll drop in on you some day. You can show me your town—Radio City, Empire State Building, the zoo—anything but college professors. Anything but college professors and their goddam dreary wives.” She leaned toward me and kissed me on the cheek, a gentle, maternal kiss, and then patted the cheek. I could smell the liquor on her breath when she spoke. “Even if I’m not around to warn you, Danny,” she said, “you
stay away from them. Holy mother of God, don’t ever let them catch you the way they caught me.”
When I got my seat on the train and looked out of the window the car was still there. I watched it until the train was far out of the station and swinging around the curve that led to Philadelphia, and it never moved.
By budgeting my money carefully I managed to make it last through the week. I got a room in one of the boarding houses near Temple University, sent my sister a postcard on which I had written See you soon to forestall search parties being sent out, and spent most of my time in museums and second-rate movie houses. During the week I recalled McGhan’s mentioning the Aegean legend about Ho megas Pan tethnekai and went to the library to look it up. I had no luck there, but when I had the inspiration of inquiring at Temple I was turned over to a classics instructor who dug up the reference for me. It was a legend like any other. After I read it I wondered why McGhan had even bothered to bring it up.
By Sunday morning I had just enough money left for a doughnut and coffee breakfast and bus fare home, but when I arrived at the bus terminal in Manhattan I found that I didn’t have change in my pockets for the subway ride uptown. There was a Traveler’s Aid booth in the terminal, and after waiting ten minutes for some teen-age sailors to give up their hopeless effort to seduce the girl in charge there I borrowed a token from her and went home with no illusions about the reception waiting for me.
FOUR
It is one of the less notable but more curious facts of life that while you will try to avoid the company of those you hate, you will often seek the company of those you merely despise. The reason is obvious. Being with someone you despise is a tonic for the ego. It gives you the satisfaction of measuring your own wisdom and virtue against the stupidity and worthlessness of the despised one. It is good for the morale, and, if the health of two generations of Egans and Asquiths may serve as a criterion, it must be good for the health, too.
The Winter After This Summer Page 4