Let Me Count the Ways: A Novel

by De Vries, Peter

  She talks mainly of the campus and how it must have changed since he last saw it, as though he was a student there. The hope is expressed with a gingerly smile that he will be up and about again soon. Here a momentary sparkle returns to the dark eyes which, together with the still abundant brown hair, contain an echo of the “spiffy gink” he once was. I can remember him sucking in his gut and throwing out his chest for the benefit of local scholars. He has the broad face and high Slavic cheekbones that are a staple of the family album, and the contrast with the motorist’s obviously Anglo-Saxon features has a kind of theatrical simplicity about it. One half expects a director to stride in and propel the scene forward on lines of stylized absurdity by saying, “When you ask him whether his brains aren’t freezing, try unscrewing the cap and dropping an ice cube from it into your highball. But don’t hoke it. I want a compassionate chuckle here, not a laugh. Let’s try it that way tonight and see what we get.”

  My mother is at the warehouse but will join us for lunch. I go rustle that up, listening alertly from the kitchen but hearing nothing impolitic from the motorist. She gets him to talk about the books he is reading. Apparently once he has his posture established and his eyes focused he can read. Once I imagine I hear the word “Lourdes.” Can it be that she is proposing he make a journey there in hopes of curing his trouble in its healing waters! I hurry in with a tray of sandwiches and a pot of coffee just in time to see him clap his hand over his mouth in the gesture common to portrayals of seasickness, as though we are already pitching toward Europe, at the same time pinching his nose between thumb and forefinger, like one who has arrived at a decision to cut off the respiration that alone perpetuates this farce.

  We are preparing to eat our lunches from individual knee-high folding tables when an oblong woman appears in the hallway and shoots her arms into the air to draw a pin from her hat—my mother. “Hello, all.” I feel a spasm of filial irritation. I am always irked by the way she takes for granted all the lunches I fix, and have fixed over the years, often trotting home from school to do so. She accepts as a matter of course also the fourth table snapped open for her to join our picnic in the parlor. Well, why not? She is the breadwinner—a term given an almost ludicrous literal pertinence by the mountain of ham and cheese sandwiches round which we now ring ourselves. The family car is hers for business use, even evenings, when she makes estimating calls on people moving. It is an old Chevrolet on which I scarcely have designs anyway, since you would never ask a girl into it. One could better advance his romantic aims from behind the handlebars of a bicycle than at the wheel of anything so square as that.

  There is no doubt that my mother, who has saved us from “bankrupture,” has herself been redeemed as a person. The crisis has drawn out her character, given her a new definition. She rose to the occasion beneath which my father sank—whatever it was. They seem to me like two figures on a seesaw whose relative positions have been abruptly reversed. Ten years ago she would of taken Miss Wellington in deferentially, would of answered all the questions shyly. Now she puts them herself. A quick, acute appraisal suffices to assure that the caller is not slumming; a crafty question or two extract her church affiliation. There is a certain hilarity in the way my mother, tugging her skirt down, tolerates the other’s high Episcopal connections, and just look at us eating off of this nest of tables from Pete Potmesil’s dreadful furniture store. Miss Wellington’s glances I return with shrugs that I dimly sense to be Jewish, unconsciously picked up from Jews I know or have seen in television plays. We Poles have no lore, no stamp, no color. We aren’t even a minority group. There aren’t enough of us.

  My mother typically taxes her caller’s own Christian charity by talking about her faith at the rate she does. She hopes in open company that her husband too has found Christ through this visitation, or will. I am grateful for this demonstration of how any toleration of even diluted high church is out for me. Out! The hope that the afflicted has seen the light prompts Miss Wellington to turn to my father and ask him point-blank, out of something more than idle curiosity I think, “What about it, Mr. Waltz? Have you found Christ?” He grabs at his nose again as though to cut off his breathing, reaching up with the other hand to steady the icebag. “We don’t always talk freely about what we feel deepest,” my mother says. “He don’t mock and blaspheme like he use to, and he hasn’t touched a drop in nearly ten years. Would you care to say grace, Miss Wellington?”

  I marvel at the grace with which she says it. As we bow our heads over the sandwiches (which we are well advised to give thanks for in advance; I bow my head more in shame than reverence) I have one of those sudden visions that set young men aflame. It has nothing to do with anything going on here. It is an unexpected sense of vocation at last, as complete and arbitrary in its inspiration, I suppose, as my mother’s conversion. It is almost mystical, and certainly religious.

  I have been feeling my eye being irresistibly drawn to our Globe-Wernicke sectional bookcase. Something is telling me to look there. Lying on top of it is a fat green volume, a textbook we have been using for senior English. And at that precise moment there pops into my mind Hopkins’s remark about Browning—my term-paper subject. Browning reminded Hopkins of a man bouncing up from the table with his mouth full of bread and cheese and saying that he means to stand no blasted nonsense.

  I laugh softly to myself as I know that literature is my field, and that I must teach. I shall dedicate my life to instilling into the young an appreciation of the glories of poetry. I do believe there is something Pentecostal in these visions that turn us on, that fill us with a sudden sense of our personal part in the divine plan.

  And now, ladies and gentlemen, a word from our alternate sponsor, the Devil.

  eleven

  ALL MARION WELLINGTON’S ideas about my father proved as vain as such speculations had always been. She did advance one interesting theory, that he is the victim of Ménière’s syndrome, the affection of the inner ear that disturbs the organs entrusted with equilibrium. But since this complaint is, like migraine, in turn regarded as emotional in origin, we are back where we started.

  Only in that regard. It is a few years later, and I am an instructor in English at Polycarp, where the motorist teaches comparative religion, all more or less according to plan. She spent a year getting her master’s at the University of Chicago while I was working on mine at Michigan, from where I sent her ardent letters advising that silk not wed canvas, etc. She must think me right, judging from the way she sits up front in assembly chapel today between my departmental head, Dr. Norman Littlefield, and the current artist in residence, a poet. The intellectual stimulus afforded by first acquaintance with my family would seem to have worn off. Now it is the twenty-third year of my life and the twelfth of my father’s hangover. I am still a humble pedestrian but I shall get a car yet if I adhere to my budget, according to which I put aside three dollars and fifty cents a week. I have just been to my doctor, and apparently I must avoid foods. That will be another great saving. Meanwhile the campus is full of lovely motorists, with whom being a member of the faculty is sometimes an advantage, sometimes not.

  The poet in residence looks as though he could do with a good meal himself. He pursues the contemporary personal ideal of abrasiveness, though enemies have been circulating malicious rumors that he is a hell of a swell guy underneath. Dr. Littlefield my boss is the reverse, bland as a banana. There are reports that his gallbladder is in upside down. Still, that’s not as bad as some of the things you see on television. Why does Goldwater not go to Russia to live? It seems to me he would be happiest in the Soviet Union, where they prize doctrinaire mentalities of that sort.

  Dean Shaftoe rises with a sheaf of notes and we know the announcements are about to begin. I lapse into woolgathering. I pretend that the room is full of something called “air,” an element of which, oxygen, it is necessary for me to inhale through two holes in my nose in order to keep going. I even invent a name for this pipedream: breathing. I real
ly must pull myself together. The Dean is dug in for one of his explanations in depth, this one about the use of special research material in the library, and I lean back in the seat and close my eyes in death.

  In the course of his three months’ hitch, the poet in residence has done very little but reside, as a colored dining-room waiter entrusted with his comfort observed. Trotting through the snow with yet another tray for him to have in his dormitory room, Harvey remarked, “Dat man sho’ know how to reside.” This was the same employe said to have answered sightseers inquiring about the rotunda dominating one end of the campus quadrangle, what it houses, or what, “Ah don’t rightly know. Ah reckon dey uses it mostly for a rotunda.” The resider affects garden gloves and a green bowtie, of which there is now unimpeachable evidence that it is pre-knotted and fastened around the neck with an elastic band equipped with a hook and ring. So now as the Dean drones on about the library I reach in from the aisle and pull the bowtie out as far as I can and start running, the resider scrambling to his feet and hotfooting along in my wake as fast as he can in a desperate attempt to close the gap between us, so that when I finally do let go (this is the humorous implication) it won’t hit him in the Adam’s apple with quite so hard a smack. In this manner I force him on a tour through town, and in fancy I can hear him yet, panting as we cross the C.B. and Q. tracks into my old neighborhood, like a vaudeville team whom the impulse of one has taken beyond the limits of the act and clean out of the theatre—to see those simple folk of whom his verse offers such a thoroughly synthetic love. He is to have all that rubbed into him now.

  “There’s the fireworks factory where I worked summers. There’s Lichtman’s dry goods store where we bought ties like this—we called them Jazzbos—but with pennies saved up in order to look decent on Sundays, not for snobbish monkey-shines, you son of a bitch!” Labored heaves alternate with the steady spank of feet behind me; a whimpered plea to sit down and rest a minute, not heeded. Rounding the turn at the City Hall now, moving nicely in our second wind, not an inch gained or lost since Waltz snatched the bowtie and started running, the advantage seized by surprise neither extended nor diminished. “There’s the Gospel tabernacle,” I puff, “just a rented store. To this I was dragged as a boy in the ceaseless struggle between my parents. You can hear the service through the open door now. There’s the old hymn, ‘Gladly the cross-eyed bear.’ And if I’m a mess, have you ever known anyone before who went through the Second Coming? Well, you do now.”

  Dusk. The streetlamps glowing like a row of dirty moons to the river’s edge. There we sink upon the bank and I let go the tie, hearing precisely the flat splat with which the elastic would of caught him in the Adam’s apple had I done so at the very outset, in the chapel aisle where in my Polycarp dreams it still seems to me that our phantom run began. But then he’d not have had this instructive tour of the town. As we drop, exhausted, on the riverbank I bring out: “I’m one of your admirers.” The death rattle which accompanies the mute gaze he turns on me prompts me to add, “You see, it was I who urged your appointment. I have great influence in the English Department.”

  He sometimes wore a ring on his thumb, the resider. Shrill as are all these claims to individuality, they none of them compare with the affectation to which we now come. I am conscious of having to state it simply, letting it speak for itself. He spelled his name with an exclamation mark behind it—Hodges! Some said he did it for the additional panache that would in consequence adhere to it, others in order to shed the “Jr.” hitherto required to differentiate him from his father, a Chicago industrialist against whom he was, of course, in revolt.

  I opened my eyes and snapped erect in my chapel seat, with the unmistakable conviction that I was going to create a disturbance. More: that I was going to make a shambles of my life. The moment was charged with the most extraordinary sense of déjà vu, the certainty that we know exactly what is going to happen in the next few seconds, as though we have lived through it before. The motivational pressure behind what I was going to do was resentment. It was no doubt the sight of the lovely motorist sitting up front between Hodges! and Dr. Littlefield that made me flip. She was too good for me, a poor hunky who could only window-shop for standing, who could never be part of such charmed little groups. That was the implication in the laughing head turned now this way, now that. My back seat became symbolic. How could a woman who liked me also like an ass like Hodges!? Admiration for his work was not enough to explain it. I admired his work too, and that was why I was always glad to see it clobbered in print. I had, oh, thirty seconds of freedom left.

  “The importance of original research varies with each subject, of course,” Dean Shaftoe was saying, “and so all of that should be gone into with the department head or teacher in question before taking your request for special material—especially material we must borrow from other libraries—to the librarian. Every department has its own norm.” Here I apparently leaned forward and through cupped hands shouted at the top of my voice, “And we’ve got Norm Littlefield!”

  You begin with the fact that everything is awful. That any two people are mismatched, that nothing will work. You go on from there. In the hush that followed, me alone grinning richly about, I began framing the letter of resignation which I would now not in the least mind writing, for, yes, I hated teaching. The whole approach is wrong. College professors are judged not by the impression they make on their students, but on one another, and on colleagues not on their own campus, but elsewhere. As though this were not sufficient idiocy in high places, their fame depends not on rumors of classrooms kindled with the thirst for knowledge, but on those lucubrations in academic quarterlies of which not the least part are them solidly caked masses of ordure in 6-point known as footnotes, like some waste extruded by the main text above, you know. No, the whole thing is screwy, and I can only hope that my suicidal blurt has struck a martyr’s blow for sanity, since Norm Littlefield is precisely one of those bogging us down in the principle of research for its own sake. I knew that Norm had got his Ph.D. in something to do with weak verbs. I had vowed to make it my life’s aim to die not knowing what weak verbs were, but some fool blabbed. They are verbs inflected with suffixes, without inherited change of the root vowel, as walk, walked, in distinction from verbs inflected with changes in the root vowel, as sing, sang. Now he had gone so far as to suggest in no uncertain terms the field for me on which he would look with favor as my sponsor: “The Clowns in Shakespeare.” Oh, my God! Well, nobody is giving me those bores for lifelong companions. And I trust everyone within the sound of my voice realizes that the pun we have just heard ejaculated is part of the self-immolating satire? For that is the point: it is not only Shakespeare, it is Shakespeare at his worst. One of the clowns might have been guilty of it, but not me I hope. Then why this ghastly silence that envelops us like a fateful cloud as we shuffle out of the chapel like mourners into the February cold?

  Eyes avoid me. Faces whisk themselves away on pretended missions elsewhere. Scraps of comment reach my burning ears. “—on earth got into—,” “—for his sake he’s drunk.” This last is probably a reference to another disciplinary case here, a student recently up for hurling a brick through the window of a downtown store, for which he was threatened with expulsion unless he could prove to the faculty’s satisfaction that he had been drinking at the time as well. One more element in the crisis should be noted. Norm Littlefield is just then himself under fire for the choice of writers he is bringing on for spells of residence among other things, therefore a more sensitive time could not be imagined for an underling bucking for promotion, or even interested in holding onto his job, not to appear to be rallying to the support of the department head—good old Norm Littlefield with his pepper-and-salt suits and his curved pipes and his seriocomic gallbladder.

  I walk on alone in my exile. For ridicule banishes us from the human community as surely as pain binds us into it. The smiles I know now to be openly proliferating behind me, the headshakes, send m
e into the wilderness as surely as the stones that drove ostracized ancients from the security of the tribe. I agree with Samuel Johnson that there are not six consecutive lines of good poetry in Shakespeare. Yet what move us are the peaks, for which we endure the stretches of claptrap and the tiresome clowns and the idiotic plots. But my plight is well put in King John:

  Thou wear a lion’s hide! doff it for shame,

  And wear a calf’s-skin on those recreant limbs.

  Limbs is good. As I hurry across the late winter ice my feet shoot out from under me and down I go in a comic-strip sprawl that breaks my leg with a snap I can hear. I lie writhing in agony, thank God. An undergraduate medical corps is hastily formed which carries me to a doctor’s office down the street. In what a twinkling our luck can change! Lolling in anguish, my useless limb dangling from the knee, I taste restoration to the human community through pain—serene in my purchase of absolution. I make a face at the Psychology Building as we go by, as much as to say, “And I suppose I willed the patch of ice to be there too?”

  “No Toby Belch today, eh, Fenton?” I say, recognizing one of my bearers as a student in the Comedies class for which I would now otherwise have been girding myself. “Or very soon. Can you see it sticking through? The bone I mean.” He threatens like the others to vomit as they stumble through the snow. “Why, they have those walking casts you know, sir,” he answers. “They’ll have you back in circulation in two shakes.”

  Fears of that are soon allayed. The x-rays in the doctor’s office show a nasty triple break he can’t possibly set there, so off we go to dry dock for some surgery.

  As I roll toward the hospital in the ambulance, pleasantly numbed by the shot of Demerol administered by a nurse with two breasts, I try to put this whole situation into some sort of appropriate Shakespearean claptrap: