Let Me Count the Ways: A Novel

by De Vries, Peter

  The mood inspired by this wretched incident had at least the merit of producing the head of steam necessary for me to sit down, with my foot on an overturned wastebasket, and write out the letter of resignation already framed in my mind. The applications for teaching posts at other colleges had long since been handed to Mr. Duncan for deposit in the mailbox outside. This being a formal communication, presumably to be handed or read to the personnel committee of the faculty, I began it “Dear Dr. Littlefield” rather than “Dear Norm”:

  Since I shall in all likelihood be asked for my resignation, I prefer volunteering it, and in so doing take the occasion to explain the action which has precipitated the present crisis.

  It was not idle. Quite the contrary. There is a growing body of opinion sharing the spirit of protest of which my public outcry was a spontaneous, nay irrepressible, expression—long overdue here as on many another campus. It is the gathering ground swell of impatience with the dead hand of scholarship as typified in the species of research fostered and required here in the English Department as it is now run. You know what I mean. Tallying the past participles in Spenser or weak verbs in pre-Chaucerian dialect, or yet another disquisition on the clowns in Shakespeare, in preference to something really good in the new—or vital in the old—is the bane of academic life as it persists under the aegis of research for its own sake, the sacred Norm under whose tyranny, yes, we labor and are heavy laden. Have a care! Some of us younger men, weary of the whited bones of erudition and aspiring to the flesh and blood of literary tradition in the making, will one day turn and rend our overseers. And if that little demonstration I heard in chapel was an indication, that day is at hand. You will have noted that nobody laughed. No, you could have heard a pin drop, such was the stunning austerity of the occasion. That indecorous but honest ejaculation was the no longer controllable rebellion of one who speaks for gathering thousands, and who speaks for them now as he says—you and your kind have got to go!

  Farewell.

  Yours sincerely,

  (Signed) THOMAS WALTZ

  That done, I diverted my mind by writing another letter of quite another sort.

  In a movie magazine I had seen lying about, I had come across an announcement of a contest involving a new Hollywood starlet, Angela Ravage, whom her studio was trying by this means to build up in the popular mind. A prize of a thousand dollars was offered for the best letter written in answer to a question posed by Miss Ravage: “Why can’t I find happiness?” This is the kind of thing that makes one’s flesh creep even while it exerts some kind of irresistible fascination over us—or at least so I have found it. Confident that I could do as well—or as badly—as the next person, I reached for a fresh sheet of paper and began rapidly to write, “Dear Angela, You can’t find happiness because you’re looking for it. Happiness isn’t something we find, but something that finds us, provided we don’t chase it and scare it away. Happiness, Angela, you see, is like a little puppy dog. If we try to catch it, it will run away from us. But if we walk along paying no attention to it, it will follow us home, wagging its,” etc.

  Nauseated as I was by what I had written, some genuine emotion seemed at the same time to be plucking my heartstrings and even misting my eyes. This was partly the strain I was under, both physical and mental. That much could not be denied. Nevertheless I must acknowledge some inner counterpart to the mawkish sentiments I was counterfeiting, no doubt kin to the starved emotions responsible for the taste in sob ballads (not mine alone). Too, I was myself sexually lonely; why had Marion Wellington not called, or sent me a get well card? Also mixed in this complex of feelings was a sheer resentment of the intellectual world in whose view I had made an ass of myself. The maudlin pap to which I could so readily turn my hand was a deliberate, perhaps perverse, wallowing in standards repugnant to those in whose eyes I was a laughingstock. Finally, this outlet undoubtedly afforded an appeasement of household gods, an expiatory sop to my parents for being as “ashamed” of them as I was. Indeed, one of the gems of my collection was a recording of “Just Plain Folks,” so cracked and valuable I was not entirely sure of the words when, the tears streaming down my cheeks, I would throw my head back and sing along with the phonograph:

  We are just plain folks, your mother and me,

  We are just plain folks like our own folks used to be.

  As our presence seems to grieve you,

  We will go away and leave you,

  For we’re sadly out of place here,

  ‘Cause we’re just plain folks.

  Consulting the magazine advertisement more closely, I noted that in addition to the thousand dollars the winner would be awarded a date with the actress if he turned out to be a man, a “visit” if a woman. This was undoubtedly an attempt on the part of the magazine, which was co-sponsor of the contest, to attract masculine readers. A meeting of that order was scarcely of interest, but I could certainly use the thousand dollars now.

  There was another discouraging development. The itching in my broken leg, which was the left one, continued and intensified, and from its nature and persistence there was no doubt of the truth to be inferred: there were ants in my cast. It was definite. The sudden sight of a file of them coursing upward in a thin line from the floor to my bed confirmed it.

  I rose instantly from it and went to my armchair, where I sat gravely evaluating the situation. I had had muffins and marmalade for lunch, particles of which must have adhered to the eating utensils I had thrust down into my cast, and which were still there. Truth to tell, I had noted ants in my room a day or two before, drawn by my snacks as justifiably predicted, and now they were being attracted on into my cast by the sweets there. I had no more than analyzed this predicament when the front doorbell sounded, and I remembered my vintner was due. “Coming!” I clomped and thudded down the stairs, rolling an empty ahead of me. Mrs. Duncan had by now of course departed for work, and I made my customary transaction through the half-opened door, handing out also my manifesto to Dr. Littlefield which I had snatched from my desk on the way out, along with the contest letter.

  “I wonder if you’d mail these for me like a good fellow. There’s a box right in front of the house there,” I said. “And here’s an extra dollar for you this time. Ah, good, the beer is nice and cold.”

  After watching from the window to make sure the delivery man posted the letters, I went to the kitchen to spray my cast with some of Mrs. Duncan’s insecticide bomb, Blast. I directed a dose of it as far down my leg as I could, drawing the rim of my cast away and my thigh muscles in, to make as wide an aperture as possible. The measure seemed efficacious, judging from the ants that were presently seen pouring, not over the top of the cast, but out the other end, through the open toe.

  From here on things deteriorated in an almost geometric progression. Upstairs I found the ants swarming around my bed and, drawing from my pocket the can of Blast which I had taken with me in anticipation of this, I sprayed everywhere as liberally as I dared. I returned the can to its place under the kitchen sink, and on my next trip up took my liquor with me, a can of beer in each pocket of my bathrobe, the bourbon as always. The beers had flip-top lids requiring no opener, and I sat in my chair and drank them both, but they gave me no pleasure. I was now quite harried and at loose ends. The room smelled of the spray, and there was a revival of activity in my cast. I had some second thoughts about the direct exposure of my skin to the pesticide, and now, assuming that whiskey must be as lethal to ants as anything, I unscrewed the cap of the bottle and poured some of that down my cast instead. Just then I caught the sound of Mrs. Duncan returning, a little early it seemed to me, and I hastily put the bottle and the empty beer cans in a drawer of my desk.

  I was innocently reading a book when she entered, presently, with my glass of milk. She stopped and pointedly sniffed the air. She was about to make some comment when the telephone rang and, setting the milk down, she hurried into the passage to answer at the upstairs extension. She returned in a moment and
announced to me from outside in the hallway: “A Dr. Littlefield is on his way over to see you.”

  thirteen

  AS I SAT waiting for Littlefield I passed the time, and beguiled anxiety, by again trying to put this mess into some sort of appropriate Shakespearean claptrap:

  I shall be packed ere thou me packing send’st

  And find some place to cool my spirit’s flush.

  The shade in which we lie the very sun from which

  We seek escape himself hath ’factured,

  Luring from summer boughs the self-same leaves

  That make a rustling haven from his heat.

  E’en so th’identical Power that deals us ill

  Some consolation fashioneth betimes.

  So husbandmen whose fields to drought are lost

  Will fear no more the pestilence and frost;

  And suitors spurned are banished in their need

  By rosy lips they’ll never have to feed.

  I shook my head again at how easy it was to turn out this stuff. Congratulating myself that I was at last out of all stifling academic concern with it.

  I had drunk a good third of the bourbon by the time Little-field arrived, and so it was doubtless this bottle courage, utter recklessness of consequence, that made me throw my crutches under the bed and crawl in after them when I heard him drawing near.

  I lay there still as a mouse, listening to Littlefield come slowly up the stairs and down the corridor to my room. I could visualize him advancing with his shuffling gait and his thatch of iron-gray hair—the “literary mane.” “Where’s my Elizabethan man?” he sang out while still coming down the passage, in his rather affected baritone. No, he was impossible. He even looked like a professor. He would have to go.

  I could hear him enter my room on Mrs. Duncan’s shouted instruction as to its whereabouts, and imagine the baffled glance accompanying the mumbled expression of his failure to locate me anywhere in it. He puttered back out to the head of the stairs to report this lack of success to Mrs. Duncan. Next was heard her firmer tread mounting the stairs and entering the room, after perhaps a brief glance into the open bathroom. She marched straight to my bed, and I saw her policewoman’s face peering under it at me as she bent down with the lifted skirt of the spread in one hand. “There he is.”

  By the time I had writhed out from under she was gone, leaving Norm Littlefield the sole witness of my struggles. “I was just … Seemed the only … Because she’s always …” I explained, heaving myself up onto the bed by my elbows, like a tired swimmer onto a rock. I wriggled backward until I lay stretched out full-length, hauling my inert leg up last, and panting heavily.

  “Well so. It’s nice to see you, Norm. Have a seat.”

  Littlefield’s face, at best scarcely suited to the expression of even one emotion, was put to considerable strain now with three or four to register simultaneously. His nose was too small for his high forehead, and both were too narrow for his chin, a wide, jutting feature with a large dimple in it, like a second navel. It seemed, his face, a composite of portions of three different faces, like those combinations which participants in newspaper contests are required to unscramble and properly reassemble with their rightful components. Vice President Hubert Humphrey gives somewhat this same impression, though on a much better-looking and agreeable scale. In Littlefield’s case everything was somehow, or seemed somehow, pulled together by his curved meerschaum pipe, which in his doubt he now produced, filled from a tobacco pouch, and lit. I watched him, unable to think of a single thing to say now that the dreaded confrontation was here at last. I could feel the ants stirring in my cast again, and promised myself that the minute I was alone in the house once more I would try sucking them out with the nozzle of Mrs. Duncan’s vacuum cleaner.

  There was some transitional talk about my break, how things were going with my classes in my absence. I held out little hope of my being once again fully mobile for some weeks, perhaps even months. Then he said something that rather took me by surprise.

  “I for one can’t wait to have you back, of course.”

  “You for one can’t wait to have me back?”

  He became flustered and, looking away, rubbed the stem of his pipe against his nose.

  “It goes without saying that I appreciate that vote of confidence. Ill-timed it certainly was, and unfortunate in that it created a disturbance in chapel. But that makes it all the more heart-warming to me. The fact that it was so spontaneous, Tom.”

  I nodded, staring fixedly at the navel in his chin, my gaze just clearing the toes of my upturned crippled foot, elevated on a pillow in keeping with the doctor’s instructions.

  Norm continued with visible emotion.

  “Yes, it makes a man feel good to know who his friends are when he’s under fire, as I told you over the phone in the hospital, and to hear his friends rally to his banner. Dean Shaftoe and President Bagley now understand clearly that I do have support—”

  “And if they give you the heave-ho it means, by God, that several of us—”

  “No. Don’t say that, Tom. Don’t go that far - yet. Thankful as I am for what I know you were going to say. Let’s leave that bridge till we come to it. Just let me go on with my point, that now the authorities know I have support in my department and that it has the courage to become vocal if need be. Our faction is in the minority, yes, but less so than when that editorial came out in the Polycarper. It’s given others the guts to come out. Newcombe grasped my arm in the hall and said, ‘You can count on me too, Norm.’ It makes a man—”

  Here Littlefield was so overcome by emotion that he brushed at his eyes, and I could feel tears welling up in mine.

  “It was nothing, Norm.”

  “It was everything. That testimonial may have been the turning point. And it goes without saying that as soon as I reasonably can I’ll recommend your promotion to associate professor. With tenure. Of course that depends on my remaining in power in the department.”

  “Well, here’s one boy you can bank on, believe you me! And don’t think I’m only thinking of the promotion as such, and hike in pay, or whatever. I even forget what it is.”

  “A five-hundred-dollar raise the first year and another five hundred the next. There’s a regular scale for that.”

  What ran through my head was a hymn I had sung so often in the mission, with the line “And the burden of my heart rolled away.” The tide of this ecstatic relief had no more than begun to flood me than it ebbed, as, with a sickening plunge, I remembered the letter in the mailbox.

  I got rid of him as fast as I decently could, bumping down the stairs on my behind to see him out in order that, having said goodbye at the door, I could watch from the curtained pane till he was safely out of sight, and then descend the outside porch stairs to the mailbox, which was almost directly in front of the house, as I have said. I risked breaking the other leg in the speed with which I hobbled over to read the schedule on the postbox. According to it, the next pickup would be at six o’clock—five to ten minutes from now. I breathed a prayer of thanks, only hoping the mailman had not been early and already gone. There had not been a pickup since I had given the letter to the liquor delivery man to drop.

  I loitered about the mailbox as nonchalantly as I could, considering that I was in a bathrobe as well as between crutches. This drew the gazes of passersby, and also, finally, that of a policeman who appeared on the corner opposite. I have mentioned that the other side of the street bordered the campus, whose square half-mile was roughly his beat. He eventually strolled over, apparently overcome by curiosity.

  “Something wrong?”

  “No. I’m just waiting for the mailman. He should be along any minute. Thanks just the same.”

  He went back across the street, but remained in view, trying to affect offhandedness himself as he paced in a narrow range with his stick dancing on its thong. I had no doubt that Mrs. Duncan was drinking in the scene similarly from the parlor window, to which I resolutely kep
t my back.

  At last a red, white and blue truck rumbled to a stop at the curb and a mailman sprang out and came over, drawing out his key chain. As he squatted to scoop the contents of the opened box into his pouch, I said, “Look, there’s a letter in there that I mailed by mistake. I’d like to have it back if I may.”

  He shook his head, squinting up at me. “Can’t give it to you.”

  “Why not? If I can prove it’s mine.”

  “It’s now in the official custody of the Post Office, and my official responsibility.”

  “There it is!” I said, recognizing it. He drew out the letter I indicated, though withholding it from my eager grasp. “It’s absolutely essential that that letter be not delivered. It’s a matter of life and death. Can’t I recall something that’s mine?”

  “Yes, but I can’t give it back to you. Not just like that. You’ll have to come along to headquarters with me to claim it. You’ve got to make out a form.”

  “All right, fine. Let’s go.”

  “Don’t you want to put on some other clothes?”

  “These are all right. Are you about ready to pull in?”

  “Couple of more stops.”

  I stood for the brief ride to the Post Office, there being only the single driver’s seat in that kind of pickup truck. The driver was a rangy man with bushy red hair and narrow eyes, which he kept averted except when a traffic maneuver justified his turning his head in my direction in a more or less natural manner. At such brief intervals I could sense him taking me in sharply. He said nothing, save for an inquiry or two about my broken leg. We passed the Christ and Holy Trinity Garage, just beyond which he made his final pickup before turning a corner and pulling in behind the central Post Office.