The Radicals

by Ryan McIlvain

  I thanked Greg and Tiffany again on their way out, keeping my seat. When Hahn and I were alone, her mouth reappeared and drew lopsided, winching up into a head-shaking almost-smile. She nodded at the plusher seat across from her desk and I dropped into it heavily. The office window brightened with a sudden swell of sun through the clouds, the white fine horizontal slats of the blinds glowing orangely at their bottom tips. Hahn’s curt blond bob was backlit too—there couldn’t have been ten windows on the entire street that got light at this hour, but she was blessed. I would have to make my intercession.

  “Well?” she said.

  “I don’t know. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I’m sorry.”

  “Why do I think you really were in bed all weekend,” Hahn said.

  “I was.”

  “But you weren’t sick.”

  “Not strictly speaking, no.”

  “Am I going to have to find a replacement TA in the middle of the semester?” Hahn looked at me levelly through her glasses, reflecting the room at me. “I’ll withdraw the question for now. But you need to carve some time out of your standing existential crisis to get your papers done, understand? Either that or I’ll have to start quoting Mao to you on work and solidarity.”

  “God no,” I said.

  “Or I’ll have to replace you. Clear enough?”

  With her fingertips, absently, Hahn slid a photocopied flyer back and forth across her desk, and suddenly there she was again, smiling out at me: the same round pretty face, slight eyes, the constellation of freckles in the mounting cheeks, the long hair done up into a sleek chignon to match the sleek sleeveless dress she wore, a formal photograph. In black-and-white the auburn hair looked charcoal-dark, the skin of her arms lightest gray. Below the photograph in a large fine font were the words Jennifer Daugherty, Senior Piano Recital, April 9, 7:30 p.m., Church of St. Joseph.

  “Ah, yes,” Hahn said, “that was the other thing I meant to tell you. Our friend”—she turned the flyer toward her—“our friend Jennifer Daugherty came to see me just before the meeting you were late to.”

  “Daugherty?” I said.

  “She came to complain about the grade on her first paper, which she said she just got back. A C plus.”

  “I remember the name, but I didn’t know who she was. Why didn’t she come to me?”

  “I told her that. I held the line,” Hahn said. “I looked through her paper and more or less echoed what you’d said—descriptive, not argumentative. Not that you’d said much. You really do need to mark up these papers more, Eli.”

  I tried to picture where she could have sat in the sunken amphitheater hall. If I’d seen her coming into class or leaving it, I’d forgotten. Which seemed unlikely. She must have sat near the front, or it could have been the middle, or anywhere on the left side of the room, really. I tended to slip in late, perch at the right back corner of the room, and slip out early. I supposed the remarkable thing would have been if I had seen her. A senior. Jennifer Daugherty…

  “I might go a bit easier on her in the future,” Hahn said. “The prose was good, good organization. If an argument shows up, she’s a top-of-the-stack writer.”

  I remembered the papers under my hands and flipped through the five remaining to me. Jennifer Daugherty’s wasn’t there. Probably for the best.

  “Her senior recital?” I said, nodding at the flyer. “What’s a senior doing in Poli Sci 110? She’s a music major?”

  “It happens now and then,” Hahn said. “You leave the required courses you’re dreading for last. That way they don’t impact your GPA as much. You never tried that? She told me it was writing-heavy classes she dreaded. I told her she didn’t need to, her grade on the first, late-returned paper notwithstanding.”

  “I know,” I said, “I know.” I was penitential now, Christian, bowing my head all the way to the wood-warm desk. I was generally unworthy.

  Hahn stood up, pulled the coat from her chairback, and slung it rakishly over her shoulder. With the other hand she closed down her computer, replaced a pair of pens in a garish red coffee mug that asked, in loud white capitals, TWO PARTIES FOR THE BOSSES, BUT WHO’S FOR US?

  “Where’s your next stop?” Hahn asked me at the door.

  She’d added my ungraded papers to her shoulder bag, and Jennifer Daugherty’s flyer too.

  “Home, I guess.”

  “Your undervalued student here is playing Mahler tonight. I told her I might just stop by. Have you eaten?”

  Outside on Twelfth Street the trees moved gently in the wind, the wind turning the leaves matte-side, then shine-side, shimmering them light against the dark-shaded backdrop of the brownstones. The wind made no sound, or only the sound of the cars and trucks and taxis motoring past, the horn peals, sirens, the great windy rustle of pedestrians, crosswalk signals, music floating down from upper stories—nature’s lip-synch. Turning onto Fifth Avenue, Hahn and I passed the bus stop just beyond the college’s main entrance where a group of mostly students, I assumed, waited. Bohemian in dress, concerned in their unconcern, they talked a little, flirted, tipped their faces down for sly glances at their glowing phones—the politer ones were sly, anyway. I’d half expected to see Jennifer Daugherty waiting there in her Randolph sweatshirt, casual and pretty, though by now she was probably at home getting ready for her recital. Which meant what exactly? Doing warm-up scales? Meditating? Doing her hair? O brave new world that has such music majors in it! Or maybe she was brooding on the overhasty C plus I’d given her first paper. I remembered her curt smile in the elevator. Did she know who I was? But she must have known. I felt the urge like a stinging cattle prod to ask Hahn if I could see the flyer again—and for this reason I resisted it.

  We’d decided on a Moroccan restaurant. Hahn knew a great place right on her street, with a great wine list. She deserved some alcohol, she said. Apparently Mondays were her new Fridays.

  “I just need to stop off at home for a few minutes to check in on things,” she said. “You don’t mind?”

  I said I didn’t mind at all.

  Hahn continued down the sidewalk at pace, leading just slightly, leaning into her steps, a toe walker.

  Suddenly she slowed. I watched her face cloud over.

  “Or if you’d rather wait for me at the restaurant…” Hahn said. “You could get us a table. It shouldn’t be too busy at this hour, but you never know.”

  The sun-split Arc d’Washington Square grew large at the end of the avenue, and we were in NYU territory. We turned left onto Eighth as a pair of students swung by us on swan-necked rent-a-bikes, the Citibank logo running down the blue center tubes. This was Soc territory to our Greaser, though of course we all swam in the same money, most of us. I knew Hahn certainly did, and she knew I knew. Why was she suddenly so shy of her apartment? Or was it her husband?

  I’d actually visited Hahn’s apartment once before, and met her husband, though maybe she’d forgotten. It was in my second year of the program, an end-of-semester party for her Labor History seminar, and I can tell you that Hahn’s sixth-floor penthouse was nothing, but nothing to be ashamed of: It was huge, bright, high-ceilinged, with a view of the Tompkins Square trees at the end of the street, though you saw them through a warren of scaffolding on the next building over. There were fine paintings on the apartment’s white plaster walls, fine rugs on the hardwood floors, recessed lighting, a fireplace, you name it. During the party Hahn’s husband, Stephen, had come out of his study to tell us hello and to make ourselves at home. He was a tall, frail, stately man, a retired ophthalmologist, with a shock of white hair and a genial wave as he stepped back behind the whitewashed door. I’d heard about the minor tremor that put an end to his career as a sought-after surgeon, but I understood he still consulted, and that the condition was manageable. I retained in my mind the image of George Plimpton, a slender, sad-eyed, harmlessly patrician old man.


  At First Avenue we stopped for a traffic light, cars and buses sliding by in the fading day, a little drained of their color, a little depleted.

  “My place is just on this next block,” Hahn said. “The restaurant’s a few doors down from it on the left. Cafe Mogador. Why don’t you go ahead and get us a table. I’ll just be a few minutes.”

  “Whatever you prefer,” I said.

  “It’ll just be a few minutes. Tell them Linda will be joining you if there’s any trouble getting a table. I’ve practically moved in there in the evenings—I’m like Sartre at the Café de Flore. Well, a little better than Sartre. Sartre used to take up a table for the entire day, and he’d only order a single cup of tea. That’s how he wrote Being and Nothingness, did you know? That massive doorstop?”

  “There’s your brief against the existentialists,” I said. “Table hogs. Hogs at life’s table.”

  “I’m sure I tip better than Sartre did too.”

  I added, apropos of too little, probably, “Did they ever get rid of that scaffolding on the building next to yours? I remember it was bugging you and Stephen when I visited with the Labor History seminar. Do you remember that party?”

  Hahn said, “We’re on the ground floor now.”

  The traffic light changed. The little white man of the crosswalk signal bade us come, chirping. Over the chirping came a car-horn beep, and another, high, polite. A dark-haired woman in a gray sculpted minivan was waving at us, nosing slowly onto St. Mark’s Place from First Avenue, smiling and waving.

  “Do you know that woman?” I said to Hahn.

  “Oh,” she said. “Oh.” She lifted her hand in a wooden wave. “Well.”

  “Neighbor of yours?”

  “Nurse,” Hahn said. “That’s Renilde. That’s Steve’s nurse.”

  When we got to the red-brick building where Hahn and her husband lived, the van was already unfolding itself onto the sidewalk, the large black metal tray lowering itself down, coming to rest with a long hydraulic hiss. Hahn stopped just short of where Renilde operated the controls at the side of the van. Renilde, olive, plump in a blue windbreaker, her brown hair in a loose bun, turned to Hahn in greeting. I was introduced as a young colleague from the college, a gross overstatement of my position, though later, thinking of it, it made my heart swell a little. They’d gone up to the West Side marina, Renilde said. To take the boat out a little. Did Hahn still need her tonight?

  The ramp ground down into the sidewalk pavement with a low dull scrape, anchoring itself.

  “All ready, Steve,” Renilde said.

  Out of the shadowy maw of the van came Hahn’s husband, pivoting, in a motorized cart, cresting the top of the ramp. The thin whine of the motor preceded him down into the last light of day. He moved slowly and steadily down the ramp, not nodding, not smiling at us, but acknowledging us with his eyes. He was horribly changed. The eyes slewed in our direction, and in them I saw the same look I had seen before, steady, a little sad, but now the sockets that contained them were hollowed out and dark, the skin of the face too, the head motionless and slumped against the chair’s padded headrest. The eyes were like living things fallen into amber, the truest things remaining to a false and mutinous body. The skin of the neck, too, was changed, shrink-wrapped around the muscles and bones of the upper shoulders. It was the same with the forearms, exposed from the shirtsleeves down. Stephen’s left hand gripped the cart’s controls in an ungainly, fisted way. The forearms and the thighs looked dropped into position haphazardly, the top half of the body skewing left compared to the bottom, as if the body were being seen half in water, half out. I looked down at the gray particulate sidewalk to reset my view and looked up again, smiling.

  Hahn made the introductions. She told her husband he’d met me once before, briefly. He said he recognized me. He’d heard a lot about me. The voice was slow, slurred, atonal—the word mongoloid stole into my mind before I could banish it. The sentences issued from Stephen’s mouth with great difficulty. Yes, he’d heard a lot about me from Linda. His mouth hitched up into a wayward, curtailed, plasticine grin.

  “Almost all of it good,” he said.

  I laughed at the quip—too loudly, perhaps. I suddenly had no idea what to do with my hands. Stephen’s lay at the end of the armrests, soft and inert; I didn’t dare reach out to shake one of them. I found myself clasping my hands in front of me in a bizarre, vaguely Asian gesture of respect—strange gesture for a dying man.

  And he was clearly dying—memento mori in the hollow cheeks, memento mori in the eyes.

  At dinner Hahn confirmed it: amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease—degenerative, terminal. Three years earlier when I’d met Stephen for the first time the first symptoms were there—they knew this now, in retrospect—but they’d tracked any number of other symptoms of other maladies, lesser maladies. It could have simply been the tremor doubling down a bit, intensifying. Old and gray and full of sleep, and a little trembly, right? That’s what we were all born to. Hahn mustered a smile, her lips inturned. At the time Steve still spoke normally, he moved normally, he was normal. Until he wasn’t anymore.

  “I’m just so glad we never had children,” Hahn said. “It’s bad enough for me to see him change like this.”

  “I had no idea,” I said. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know the extent of it.”

  “A month ago he was walking on his own power. He could walk up the stairs and into the apartment on his own—it was slow, but he could do it. Now he needs the wheelchair for everything. He’s in a wheelchair. It’s accelerating. This thing—it’s breaking into a run.”

  “And what comes next?” I said. “I mean about treatment options. Forgive me. I meant in terms of treatment.”

  “You mean in terms of management,” Hahn said. “That’s all that’s left. The doctors are masters of evasion, false optimism, statements that sound substantive until you think them through—every one of them could run for office—but even they don’t give him more than two years. It could be two months, two weeks. We’re living like children, in the horrible present.”

  Hahn laughed suddenly, bitterly, wagging her head at the filigreed teakettle at the center of the table. “Do you know where they went today?” Hahn said. “Renilde and Steve? It wasn’t to the marina, I can tell you that. Renilde isn’t licensed to captain the boat and Steve’s not able anymore—and he knows I know that. He’s not even trying with his cover stories anymore. No, they went up to Woodlawn Cemetery. How they made that wheelchair-accessible I don’t know, but they went there to visit the grave of Herman Melville, at Steve’s insistence. In his retirement he’s started reading more, and the heavy stuff, too, Melville, Beckett, all the godless metaphysicians, and so today he goes and leaves a pen at Melville’s tomb. That’s what he does now. He reads books about endless water, and visits cemeteries.”

  “God…” I said.

  “Yup. Yup.”

  Hahn forked through her plate of chicken tagine, half eaten in a rubble of couscous. What pinot noir remained in her glass looked purplish, the color of a dark bruise, almost black in the dim lighting of the restaurant. We sat at a smooth simple lacquered table near the bar. Wineglasses hung upside down above the bar and caught the light going down in a perspective row, glinting like Christmas ornaments. I watched the bartender, thirtysomething in an old Brooklyn Dodgers jersey, bearded, head shorn, light a row of tea candles along the bar top with sacramental care. The little fires warmed the underside of his face and the faces of the few people hunched forward against the bar at the outset of dinner rush. A few more showed up in the time I watched. The restaurant began to glow orangely, cocoon-like against the darkness outside. The couples through the sunk-in picture window and the metal scrollwork of the patio sat fading in the gloom, disappearing. Beyond them, across St. Mark’s Place, squares of warm yellow light began to climb up the apartment houses.<
br />
  When we parted company that night, I told Hahn I’d probably just head home too. She was bloody exhausted—those were her words—and she had homework to do because of me. A little water lit up her small eyes behind the glasses. Neither of us said anything. She did give me the music flyer, just in case. I hadn’t asked for it. I folded the paper and put it in my pocket, left Hahn with an uncharacteristic hug, and didn’t take the paper out again, and didn’t unfold it and behold its round serious pretty face again, until the spot-lit glowing arch of Washington Square loomed up out of the darkness at my left.

  St. Joseph’s Church was a white Grecian temple in the middle of Greenwich Village. Dramatically lit, its thick fluted columns stood to either side of bright red double doors, an incurved arch for the prayerful Lord just above them—the building could have been a stylish stock exchange, or a town hall. The gold stubby cross at the apex of the roof appeared to be something of an afterthought. I was ten minutes late. A side door, also red, stood ajar, leaking thick muddy chords, fierce attacks, out into the cool dark air where I stood hesitating, checking the time on my cell phone, gripping the door handle, ungripping it. I had turned toward the flight of granite steps when the last chords of the piece rang out, unmistakably tonic. I stepped into the hall under cover of thin applause. The U-shaped whitewashed balcony, a line of blazing crystal chandeliers, a high flat blue-and-white pie-latticed ceiling stretched above me, and I was one of ten, maybe fifteen people in the room. Jennifer Daugherty, her thin white arms pressed flat against her sides, bowed stiffly from the waist at the front of this bright-lit expanse. She stood close to the black piano bench beside the hulking black of the concert grand, its lid uptilted like a massive wing, as if the instrument might take flight at any moment, spiraling up to the ceiling and lifting its nervous conductor up with it. Thirty meters separated me from Jennifer, but in the stillness and emptiness of the crowd—a bevy of gray heads in the front pews, a few friends, presumably, in young dresses and jackets, a goateed priest in his Oreo habit—in this sparseness I could easily see the stress lines on Jennifer’s face, and she could see them on mine. Her eyes widened a little as they took me in, then seemed to settle back. I couldn’t have left now if I’d wanted to.