Let Me Count the Ways: A Novel

by De Vries, Peter

  “I’d like to go back to school.”

  “You would?”

  “I’m twenty-two. I only had two years of college when some character ‘discovered’ me in a play there. It was Skidmore. I wasn’t too happy there, or then. I’d like to try some place else. How’s Polycarp?”

  “I don’t think it would be to your taste. The head of the philosophy department is a Platonist, an idealist. He’d be dishing out a point of view you wouldn’t care for.”

  “All the same I’d like to take a look at the place, now that I’m this close. I’m staying in the Midwest for a few days. I’d like to go back with you.”

  “There was a man in the restaurant, I don’t know whether you noticed, who took an air pillow in with him? The captain’s face was a sight to behold. Tickled me pink. I hate snobbishness, and I like to see it brought low.”

  “You’ve got something in your craw. What is it?”

  “May the Lord smite all those who put on airs, all those who upstage another. May he dash them to pieces with a rod of iron.”

  “Waltz. What kind of a name is that anyway?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “You mean you don’t know what nationality you are?”

  “We lived in a neighborhood where there’s a dense Polish population. At least they seem dense to me.” Father forgive! Mother forget! Heed not the crowing cock again!

  “You say you teach Shakespeare. Do you take any position about all these theories? Who do you think wrote the plays?”

  “I lean to the group theory. Anybody can write the stuff who puts his mind to it. You even get so you think that way. Even find yourself extemporizing it.”

  “Extemporize some. Say something to me in Shakespeare.”

  “To celebrate thee suitably a contradiction were, for best to do thee homage would be to show how thou hast stopped me dumb. For thou hast so infested my commuting blood, which to the suburbs of my feet doth flow and back again, that something something further heats my somethinged brain. Fevered brain. Till in mid-flight the pinions of articulation falter, and my tongue palsies at its sweetly hopeless task.”

  She smiles watchfully at me across the top of her glass. I see that I am making far too much headway.

  We drove down with Quincy in his car the next afternoon, as it turned out.

  Since I expected to be fired anyway, I could see nothing to lose by showing Miss Ravage around the school. She would certainly make a hit with the students, especially the boys, and might just charm the faculty if generally put on view. Quincy’s motivation for the trip was twofold: continued closeness to Angela Ravage, and the interview for a possible job as press relations man for the college which I had promised him. He took a camera along, a device not far short of blackmail. There would be no more pictures in local newspapers provided I made good my promise. He insisted first that the interview be accompanied by my personal recommendation, but I convinced him that in the present pass this would be a liability rather than an asset. He packed in the camera just in case—and of course there remained the possibility of our getting a shot of Miss Ravage winning over the student body, or Miss Ravage thinking about enrolling at Polycarp: publicity of a kind that would make people forget all about my letter and might even prove advantageous to President Bagley on his fund-raising tour. I arranged by telephone for Marion Wellington to join us on a double date, a stratagem by which I hoped further to appease Quincy by throwing him Miss Ravage in the resulting foursome. Marion herself proved entirely sympathetic on the phone. “How can anyone go on making such a fool of himself?” she said.

  All in all, I felt a good deal better about things as we left the main highway from Chicago, that afternoon, and turned into Slow Rapids, climbing the long street that mounted toward the college. My dismay at what awaited me, therefore, can be imagined. As we wound along the driveway leading into the campus proper, I saw that the flag above the Administration Building was flying at half mast. We had not heard the news in some hours, and wondered if a governmental official or other national figure had died. Quincy stopped the car, and I sprang out to make inquiries of several students who were walking by. It was then that I learned the news that Norm Littlefield had passed away.

  A word of comment which anticipates the story somewhat is not, I think, amiss here. It will put certain facts otherwise open to misinterpretation, and even now still often garbled in the telling, into some kind of badly needed perspective.

  Norm carried too much insurance. There was no doubt about that. And who knows how many a demise is not hastened by the burdens unwisely shouldered by being too heavily written up. The thing becomes a kind of vicious circle, a self-defeating paradox in which an outcome feared is brought on by the means intended to provide against it. Among people familiar with the facts of Norm’s private life, this was his besetting folly. The strain of meeting unrealistic premiums was only the last straw among other fiscal imprudences. Wisdom had dictated a life far more moderate than Norm actually lived, one free of the stress he so recklessly invited by the many administrative chores he also needlessly took on, not to mention the pace a socially ambitious wife led him. That the amount of coverage with which he humored her was outrageously more than he could afford was in due course reflected by the scale on which his widow was presently able to live—far more splendidly than she had on a poor professor’s pay! But I do not wish to indulge in personalities here, or criticize the woman unduly. Anybody’s life is his own to live as he wishes, or as he must, which was perhaps the case here. I am only revealing facts which came to light, and assurances with which people very kindly came forward.

  The Administration Building was open, though it was Sunday, and I suspected President Bagley was in his office seeing to “arrangements” and attending to other matters relating to the misfortune. As I stood uncertainly in the driveway, his secretary appeared in the doorway and urgently beckoned me over. “President Bagley has been trying to get you,” she said. “I think you’d better go and see him now.”

  I dismissed my frieinds, giving them directions to a tavern where they might get a drink and possibly stay on for dinner, as well as await word from me, though there was little likelihood that I would join them. I explained to Quincy that an interview with the president was now out of the question, as was showing Miss Ravage around the campus. They drove off as I made my reluctant way once again into the president’s office.

  “Well, you’ve killed the head of the English Department.”

  This was what I had been hoping he would say. I wanted him to blurt out an excess from which he would in all conscience have to retreat, owing me an apology. The result was that the grievance rather dramatically changed hands.

  “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”

  “It’s quite all right. We all say things we don’t mean in circumstances like these when everyone’s upset. The thing to do is pull ourselves together and decide what is best.”

  The best thing to do when someone dies is bury him—that was the thought brought readily to mind by this way of putting things. But President Bagley knew I was thinking beyond the immediate tragedy to the larger aspects of the problem from the school’s point of view. Making a visible effort to control himself, he said:

  “Unfortunately we can’t always have what is best. The blow of Norm Littlefield’s loss turns out to be all the more bitter because neither Blodgett nor McGeese plans to return next year. Both have just told me they have taken jobs at other colleges. It’s as though everyone is running out on me. This is very serious as far as I’m concerned.”

  “I too. They’re both bangup men, and I’m sorry to hear they’re leaving.”

  “Yes. That means that neither of the two men logically next in line, both in terms of seniority and general merit, can be counted on to step into Norm Littlefield’s shoes. Everything seems to be unraveling here like an old sock. Jowett is a brilliant but erratic young man. His reviews have won him a following and given the faculty a dash of
the avant garde that’s all to the good, but he wouldn’t set well with our more conservative supporters.” He paused and, darting a quick glance at me before rearranging the blotter pad on his desk, said, “We shall have to make you acting head of the English Department.”

  Needless to say I was stunned by this announcement. I had not expected anything of the sort. I recovered myself long enough to reply, very nearly choking up, “Dr. Bagley, it is unnecessary for me to say that I hardly consider myself worthy of this honor, this trust—”

  “At least we are in agreement on that point.”

  “—but I shall do my best—my absolute dedicated best—for Polycarp.”

  “It’s only temporary of course, until we find someone who …” He tried by a vague gesture to indicate the general concept of adequacy lacking in the present patchwork. “We’re in correspondence now with a couple of people. This is an emergency measure, and I emphasize that you’re acting head. Seeing to it purely that administrative processes go on. Nothing more. In fact, one of your first duties will be to help us find somebody better—as well as replacements for Blodgett and McGeese.”

  He pushed across the desk to me a sheet of paper on which were the names of three or four possibilities for the post in question, all teachers at Midwestern colleges and universities, only one of whom I recognized, as the author of some treatise Norm Littlefield had made me read. Teachers must keep up with their homework as well as students. This was followed by the files on these prospects, including correspondence and notes, as well as folders on possible new English teachers as such, irrespective of their likelihood as executive timber. The president must have extracted some of the latter material from Littlefield’s desk.

  “I’d like you to take it home with you and study it. Especially the dossiers, which aren’t by any means complete. Do what you can about filling them out and keeping them up to date. Find out what you can about everybody. Read what they’ve written. That’s important.”

  “I’ll drop everything but my classes for it. My own research certainly.”

  “What’s that?”

  “‘The Clowns in Shakespeare.’ It was a field Norm wanted me to devote myself to.”

  “Oh, yes, I remember. Well, do your best for everyone’s sake. Pitch in. Now I’ve got to get busy over the arrangements. There’ll be a service in the Episcopal Church, in which the school will participate. I’ll deliver a brief eulogy myself. So if you’ll excuse me. God bless you.”

  “God bless you, sir.”

  As I shuffled humbly out the door and down the front steps, clutching the folders, my eyes to the ground, I felt that my pants were baggy, my shoes several sizes too large, and the tears were coursing down either side of a huge putty nose.

  seventeen

  I WISH I could say that this marked the end of the string of maladventures so far related. Such, however, is not the case. We are all from time to time subject to one of those runs of bad luck that have an almost mystic reality about them, as Maeterlinck noted—sequences we call jinxes that yet strike us as being organically related in some kind of cause-and-effect chain reaction. The most dismal episode of all occurred, unfortunately, at Norm Littlefield’s funeral.

  The service itself was quite a nice one. All were agreed on that. The sole exception was the somewhat stilted eulogy delivered by the rector of the church, which Norm of course attended. He kept referring to “the deceased,” and the like. The deceased! Norm had never been that to me, or to any of us who had known and loved him in life. He had always been just good old Norm Littlefield, the pipe-chewing, pleasantly professorial friend to all. I noticed Marion Wellington sitting three pews forward of me with her head bowed during this oratory, for embarrassment I was sure, because she sat erect enough throughout Dr. Bagley’s much more human and touching tribute, and when the college choir sang a Bach chorale. The church was quite full. Burial was said to be at a local cemetery, Norm having lived here long enough to feel Slow Rapids was his home. It was during this part of it that the difficulty arose.

  I was driving Quincy’s car. Both he and Angela Ravage had stayed on, the one in hopes of still obtaining an interview with the head office, the other out of some vague sense of partial responsibility for all this, however indirect or unintentional. With Marion we had all gone out to dinner the night before, a rather subdued occasion in the course of which the women got off together for a bit and Angela pumped Marion about everything, including the dramatic antecedents of this mess of which we were all victims. The two had hit it off beautifully, while any rapport between Quincy and myself had rapidly dwindled to nothing. He sulked while I brooded. At any rate, having gotten an earful of what was what, Angela wanted to stay till the funeral was over, even though she didn’t attend it. So I borrowed Quincy’s car. I could drive perfectly well since it was an automatic shift requiring nothing of my bad left leg. That was how the following rather harrowing incident came about.

  I did not plan to go to the cemetery. Far too much work, of the kind I was carrying on in Littlefield’s stead, remained undone, and I felt it my duty to get back to it as soon as possible. I slipped out of the funeral cortege, therefore, at what seemed to me the most discreet possible moment—at a street intersection a hundred yards or so from the front of the church where we were all lined up along the curb. I turned right up Simon Street and, settling down behind the wheel, headed for home in anticipation of the afternoon’s work I might still get in. I had gone about half a block when I glanced into my rear-view mirror and saw to my horror that the entire procession had followed my lead and were turning off with me.

  Frantically, I tried to get hold of myself and decide what was best to do in what was an appalling emergency. I seemed to remember that I had been very close behind the flower car—only two or three cars ahead of me as I recalled—and so I had indeed deflected very nearly the bulk of the cortege, and was now leading them through town in a direction exactly opposite from where the Fairmount Cemetery lay. In my panic, all I could do was try to shake them. Detached from me, they would presently see their mistake and rectify it with no harm done, or very little. Merely a few minutes’ delay. That was my reasoning.

  But it was impossible to give them the slip. I stepped on it. So did they. I turned right and shot up Willoughby Avenue. So did they. I was soon doing a decidedly undignified forty-five miles an hour on this boulevard, the entire train rocking in my wake. Or at least the few cars visible to me remained there—perhaps behind them the whole cortege was disintegrating. This was becoming a nightmare. I saw a double-decker, or piggyback, truck carrying new automobiles up ahead, and conceived the stratagem of whipping in ahead of it in a burst of speed and in so doing detaching myself from the blundering hordes at my rear. Which I accordingly did, getting into position there just in time for a red light. The light changed almost instantly, a stroke of good luck, and I was off again in a quick getaway. I kept watch in the rear-view mirror to check the success of this maneuver, which seemed sure. But then after another block or so I saw the next car in my retinue nudging round the truck, which slowed respectfully as the driver of the truck apparently saw it was a funeral. There were stickers to that effect on all our windshields, pasted on by someone during the services. I tried to scratch mine off, without success. The mourners by now must have been doing fifty-five or sixty at least, and managed again to close the gap behind me.

  My faculties were now in full rout. I had no idea what I was doing except that I must make my escape. Every moment made that more imperative. The need to do so became an obsession, frenzied in its intensity. Yet timing, and a certain subtlety, were at the same time required. I slowed down in order to approach the next traffic light just as it was turning from green to red, guaranteeing that my pursuers would be caught by it just as I myself shot free across the intersection. At the same time I made an abrupt left turn, going hell-for-leather into something called Ashland Avenue. For some moments my rear-view mirror remained blessedly blank. I held my breath. Then I
saw the entire damnable file turn into the street with me as traffic on the one I had just abandoned dutifully stopped to let it pass through the red light. What other motorists and pedestrians thought of the speed with which we rocketed through town God alone knew. My next turn was the last possible. I had headed into a vermiform appendix, a blind alley. The street was Edgeworth Court, an obscure lane in a part of town I had certainly never been in before. It seemed to peter out into some sort of private drive, up which, however, I turned in a last desperate measure. There was nothing else to do. I bumped through a few hundred yards or so of sandy rut, and came to a stop in a lumber yard. I bowed my head on the steering wheel and waited for them to come.

  I heard, rather than saw, the cars draw to a stop behind me, anger in the very motors. Doors opened and slammed. There were footsteps, then several people looking in my window. One of them was President Bagley.

  “Waltz.” His voice sounded as it had over the telephone a few days before, high and strained. His face was the color of eggplant, and his hands worked spasmodically. “Waltz, if I could understand what you were up to just once, I would go to my grave a happy man.”

  “And very soon too,” I thought to myself in alarm, genuinely concerned by his appearance. I wanted to tell him that, warn the man. There were rumors that Dr. Bagley had a cardiac condition warranting prudence as to his own way of life, as well as the avoidance of unnecessary agitation such as this. I murmured apologies in as soothing a tone as I could as I opened the door and climbed out to join the now considerable party. “I was just … All a ghastly … How it ever …” I began by way of explanation, gesturing in the direction we had come and revolving one palm against the other in a motion intended to convey the idea of highly complex maneuvers. There was a crowd of at least twenty people, all talking and giving advice at once. Three or four stood to one side and simply shook their heads. The rest of us tried to figure out what was best to do.