Virginia gave her very specific instructions, down to the approximate number of feet after the light till she’d encounter the turnoff to the Bronx River. She radiated none of the scattered, frazzled energy Eileen remembered, and Eileen felt a sudden crushing loneliness at the thought that she hardly knew Virginia at all.
She listened to Virginia describing the familiar route. She had bought herself time to catch her breath. She would never come back now, never be able to reveal herself to her or sit in her living room without a great deal of uncomfortable explaining. She searched Virginia’s face for clues to the story she’d never get to hear—whether she’d had kids, whether her husband was still around, whether she’d had a happy life.
“Thank you,” Eileen said when Virginia was finished.
“It’s my pleasure.”
“You have a beautiful house,” she said. “A very beautiful house. I really can’t help admiring it.”
52
After they left his grandmother’s apartment, they drove through the neighborhood, up Smith, along the Gowanus Expressway, and looped around to come down Court. When they hit Lorraine, they turned right and crept along.
He knew all the street names by now. This was the third weekend in a row his father had taken him to his old neighborhood to show him around. His father was trying to squeeze it in before he forgot what everything was.
They reached the Red Hook Pool. “This is where we swam when I was a boy,” his father said. “It’s hard to believe it’s been so long. Everybody was naked and nobody realized it. It was great. We spent the whole day here and at the end we were like prunes. It’s still being used today, you know.”
Connell nodded politely; he was missing a Halloween party for this.
“Not today,” his father said. “I know that. It’s too cold today. Today in general.”
His father stopped the car. There was an honest, open look on his face. Ugly thoughts flashed through Connell’s mind.
Do you know, really? What do you know anymore? You never really were like a normal father in the first place, were you? You were always more of a dork than the others. You and your obsessively catalogued cassette and VCR tapes, your long-sleeved shirts in the summer, your never wearing shorts, your old movies, your corny jokes. You and your lab coats and sharpened pencils. You and your insistence on perfect grammar and enunciation. You and your spazzy sneakers, your sweat-stained baseball caps, your ear hairs. You and your never exceeding the speed limit by more than a couple of miles an hour. You and your beakers, your clipboards, your briefcase. You and your boring stories of the old neighborhood. I could break your heart right now if I wanted to, you big dork, you nerd, you spaz, you geek, you herb, you Poindexter.
Then his father faced the road again and they turned onto Columbia. They came to a derelict building with a long, faded sign that spelled KOHNSTAMM in capital letters. “This is what’s left of the factory I worked at,” his father said. Graffiti dotted its surface, and weather had worn off much of the paint, so that the ghostly outline of the words MANUFACTURING CHEMISTS could just barely be distinguished below the name. “There used to be so much manufacturing in this city. Now those jobs are gone. Factory work was a—how do I say it? It was an incubator for the middle class.”
His father was having one of those extended moments of lucidity in which he could hold forth about some topic and it wouldn’t seem like anything had happened to his mind. Connell always got a little charge of hope from them, a sense that some part of his father might be able to make it back from the other side of the creaky rope bridge.
“I wouldn’t have gotten where I did if it weren’t for a manufacturing job. We don’t make anything in this country anymore.”
“We make missiles,” Connell said. “Movies. Hamburgers.”
His father seemed not to have heard him. “I worked here at your age,” he said. Then he looked at him searchingly. “No, a little older than you. In my early twenties. I keep thinking you’re older than you are. You look so much like my brother Phil.”
Connell turned the radio on, found WDRE. The beginning notes of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” were playing and he turned it up. He didn’t even care if his father told him to turn it down, because in his mind he wasn’t really there. Maybe he wasn’t really there in his father’s mind either.
53
I need you to help me prepare for the tournament tomorrow.”
“Okay.”
“The resolution has to do with whether euthanasia is morally justified. I have to develop both a pro and a con argument. Do you know how this works?”
“I think so.”
“I’m going to come at you with pro. I want you to be con. Then we can switch it up. I’ll make my first affirmative. Then you do a cross-examination. We’ll go from there. I’ll talk you through it. Okay? Ready? My first contention is that euthanasia is justified because every human being has the supreme right of self-determination. We uphold an individual’s right to determine where he lives, where he works. If we consider those rights to be sacred, then there is no more fundamental right a person can hold than when he chooses to die. Patients should have the right to maintain control over their own situations. By allowing people to make their own decisions, we preserve free choice and human dignity. Dad, you’re supposed to be taking notes.”
“I’m listening.”
“You’re supposed to take notes, so you can come at my contention and try to take it down. Here. Write down what I say. You’re supposed to be scribbling fast. Come up with a counterargument. Try to find chinks in the armor of my argument. Challenge its underlying assumptions. You can argue that many people desirous of euthanasia who survive apparently terminal illnesses would wind up grateful they hadn’t been euthanized. Hit me hard, Dad. I need to practice evading without seeming to. It needs to look artless and artful at the same time. I need to stay calm and confident. Try to goad me into saying something stupid and mean. Last week I was a jerk, and even though I totally destroyed my opponent, the judge gave me a twenty-four–twenty-three, which messed up my seeding in the octofinals. Girls can be as aggressive as they want, which totally sucks. That Stuy girl couldn’t have been nastier, and she got a thirty–twenty-three. Then again, if I were a better debater, I could be really nice and get points for being so damned sweet. So that means practice, practice. I’m coming at you, Dad. Anyway, you can say, ‘It’s unfeasible. It’s impossible to put it into practice equitably.’ ”
“It’s unfeasible. It’s impossible to . . . what was that?”
“Never mind. Listen, conversations about efficacy are banned. So I say, ‘My opponent is making a policy argument that has no place in Lincoln-Douglas debate.’ Boo-yah!”
“What? What happened?”
“I need to come up with some better hypotheticals. Something from Plato, Jefferson. Those fluency whores at Stuy aren’t going to eat my lunch over a goddamned metaphor.”
“What?”
“Nothing. Stuy is running Locke on aff. I want to be neg. I’m practically begging for neg. Let them play their strong hand. I’m taking that girl down this week. I can taste it. My second contention: the ‘social contract’ argument. The individual sacrifices certain rights and liberties to live under the protection of society. If an individual sacrifices the right to harm other people in exchange for the protections of living in society, euthanasia is justified because it is an act that has no harmful effects on others.”
“I don’t believe in euthanasia, son.”
“This is why you should affirm the resolution that euthanasia is morally just.”
“It’s not just, son. It’s not just or right at all.”
“Dad! I’m talking to the judges. I can’t look at you. Eye contact with the judges is crucial. You need to rebut me. Make a ‘slippery slope’ argument. If we allow euthanasia, it creates a slippery slope where suicide is justifiable. There would be rampant eugenics. Coerced euthanasia. It would have a disproportionate racial and economic impac
t. People might be pressured to euthanize others for positive gain or else to avoid an economic hardship.”
“Nobody is pressuring anyone to commit euthanasia. Not in this country.”
“Say that it’s not within the rights of the medical field to help patients die. Say that it’s their responsibility to help them improve or at least continue life, no matter its quality. Because if you say that, then I can argue that many terminally ill patients suffer a great deal of pain and no longer wish to have their lives artificially prolonged.”
“You lost me.”
“My third contention is that at times of extreme pain for the patient, euthanasia is the most humane alternative.”
“People get through pain.”
“Argue that new and improved pain-relieving medicines are being discovered all the time. That the timeline for such decisions must be extended to reflect the speed of technological change.”
“All I know is I don’t believe in euthanasia.”
“My opponent never responded to my third argument, so you should carry that through and affirm the resolution.”
“What argument? Son, can we stop this? Can we just talk?”
“You want to know what’s the best neg example you could have, Dad? You are. With your Alzheimer’s. Think about it. If we euthanized people at will, maybe you would have been taken out already. For the good of the herd.”
“Or maybe you would, son.”
“That Stuy girl is going to wish I had gotten taken out when I run into her in the finals this week.”
54
Early in the spring semester, Ed’s chair, Stan Kovey, called her at work to let her know that they’d had several complaints from Ed’s students, including, though he assured her it wasn’t credible, an anonymous death threat.
“A death threat?”
“Not death,” Stan said mildly. “I shouldn’t have said death. Just injury.”
“Well, isn’t that a relief.”
“I’m not calling so much about the threat,” Stan said. “We’ve dealt with them before from disgruntled students. Some of these kids have learned not to trust institutions, due process, and the redress of injustices. What we need to discuss—”
“They were going to beat him up, Stan.”
“More likely they were going to hire someone to do it,” he said, an odd reasonableness in his voice.
“A hitman!”
“More like a thug,” he said. “Ed would have gotten a warning first.”
“The goddamned ingrates,” she said. “The filthy, degenerate sons of bitches. He gave the best years of his life to these animals. They don’t deserve him.”
“They’ll be disciplined,” Stan assured her.
“They should be expelled,” she said, and she wanted to continue, to say, They should be tarred and feathered. They should be run through with swords. They should be brought before a firing squad.
“They probably will be,” Stan said. “Listen. This isn’t about the threats, this is about Ed.” He paused. “And his work.”
Her heart was racing. It was the call she’d been fearing for a long time, and they still needed a year and a half to get to his thirty-year mark.
“Why are you calling me?” she said, thinking it safest to mask her anxiety as incredulity. “Wouldn’t it be better to talk to him directly?”
“I’ve wanted to talk to Ed for a while, but he’s stopped talking to anybody. He pops into the department office to check his mailbox and leaves immediately. He shuffles through the halls with his head down. I left a note in his box, but he’s ignored it. I tried to stop him in the office to ask him to sit down, and he just brushed past me. I wanted to talk to him as a friend before I have to talk to him as his department chair. So I thought to call you.”
“I appreciate that,” she said, though she burned with resentment at the thought of this thoroughly average man, whom she’d hosted for dinner several times in Jackson Heights when he was a junior faculty member, claiming to speak as Ed’s chair, when the only reason he held the position in the first place was that Ed had refused it.
“It seems,” Stan said, “from what we’ve been able to reconstruct, that Ed was assigning the wrong grades to students. I saw the papers. Something was definitely going on. His fall grades were a mess.”
She didn’t know how the semester grades could have been a mess, because she’d supervised their tabulation. Maybe Ed had lost the sheet with the grades and had made a new one up at the last minute.
“I’m calling you,” Stan said, “because, well, did you know anything about problems he was having? Did Ed say anything?”
She felt cornered. “No,” she said. “I had no idea.”
“I need to know, Eileen. We’ve been colleagues, Ed and I, for over ten years. You know that Ed’s like family to me. What’s going on with him?”
He might have thought himself a friend, but he was calling as the department chair. “He’s had some headaches lately,” she said instinctively. “Migraines. He’s going in for a brain scan next week. They want to check for a tumor.”
“A tumor? Jesus, Eileen. I’m so sorry.”
“Thank you,” she said. “We’re hoping for the best.”
After she hung up the phone, she called Jasper Tate. Jasper was Ed’s protégé and partner on the grant research. His four-year-old daughter was Ed’s goddaughter. She told Jasper about her conversation with Stan but left out the part about the brain tumor.
“You must be shaken up,” he said.
“Can I trust you with something, Jasper? I mean, can I trust you not to speak to anyone about something?”
“Of course.”
“Ed loves you like a son,” she said.
“I feel the same way about him.”
She left a long pause on the line. “He’s got Alzheimer’s.”
“My God.”
“We don’t want anyone in the department to know.”
“Okay.”
“We want to keep him going a little longer. He wants to keep teaching.”
“Of course.”
“I lied to Stan.”
“What about?”
“I told him Ed’s being tested for a brain tumor.”
Jasper chuckled warmly. She felt the compression in her chest lift.
“I don’t mean to laugh,” he said, trying to pull the gravity back into his voice. “It’s just—Stan. He’s so . . . Stan.”
“No,” she said. “I needed that. This whole thing has been so unreal, so crazy.”
“I can cover for him,” Jasper said. “I’ll help him prepare for class. I’ll grade his things. His students can come to me for help.”
She knew what Ed would say to Jasper’s offer: I can’t do that to you, Tatey. You have important work to do. She felt at times as if she was on a long trek and had lost her compass many miles back. She knew she should probably not involve this lovely man in the dissembling.
“Maybe you can help for a little while,” she said.
“Yes. Great.”
“Do me one favor,” she said.
“Anything.”
“Play dumb. Don’t tell Ed we spoke. Just help him. He won’t notice the difference. With the grading, yes, you may have to say something. Let him feel like he’s doing you a favor. Maybe you want to compare the quality of work in different sections, I don’t know. I don’t need to explain Ed to you. So far as he knows, this conversation never happened.”
• • •
A week later, she called Stan and told him they had ruled out a tumor but had no lead yet about what else might be causing Ed’s sluggishness. She said she would get back to him as soon as she had a better sense of what was going on.
The next morning, she grabbed Ed as he was headed to work. “You leave there as soon as you’re done teaching,” she said. “You understand?”
He nodded.
“Don’t get into conversations with anyone. Not your students, no one. Only Jasper Tate.”
He
nodded again.
“If you do find yourself in a conversation,” she said, “under no circumstances are you to tell anyone that you’ve been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.”
“What’s Alzheimer’s?” he asked, and she felt her spirit breaking, until she looked at him and saw the outline of an impish grin forming on his face.
“Don’t you start with me,” she said, but she was thinking, Lord, don’t let this part of his personality die just yet. If you need ideas for other parts to take away first, I can make a list.
55
Ed was already asleep when the phone rang. She’d been dreading the call for a month.
“Things have gotten worse,” Stan said. “He’s got to come out of the classroom. For his sake, for the students.”
She put a pot of water on to try to calm herself down. The wind howled and rattled against the kitchen window.
“If you think that’s best,” she said. “What’s the administrative protocol? Do you have some rubber room you’ll put him in?”
“I was thinking he’d retire.”
“He has no interest in retiring,” she said. “He has fifteen years before he even thinks about retiring.”
“He can’t do the job anymore, Eileen.”
“He has rights as a tenured professor. He’s supposed to be given time to take corrective action, isn’t he?”
“It would be good for the department if he retired.”
She felt herself begin to shake, more in fear than in anger. She couldn’t help wishing she could turn to Ed for advice; he was always clear-sighted at times like these. She knew it would be hell for him if she forced him to keep going to work. He would be in an adversarial relationship with his department; they would be looking for signs of incompetence.
“I don’t give a damn about the department,” she said. “He’s given enough to the department. I’m interested in my husband.” Her mind was working feverishly. Every passing second would erode her bargaining position. She tried to think like Ed. Ed would have worked out some algorithm in his deep subconscious to produce the right answer. He would have seen it from the beginning. “He could probably sit there for two years,” she said. “That’s how long the review process would take, especially for someone with as exemplary a record as Ed.”
We Are Not Ourselves Page 38