Straight Man

by Richard Russo

  I indulge this pleasant fantasy for a few minutes and then browse Dickie’s tall bookshelves for further diversion. Actually, I’ve heard a story about these books from Jacob Rose, though I discounted it at the time. Few men tell a better story than Jacob, but then, too, few have less regard for the truth. Jacob isn’t particularly malicious, at least by the rather liberal standards of academe, but he loves to embellish and is willing to do almost anything to improve a tale in the telling.

  As Jacob tells this particular story, during the early summer of his hiring, Dickie Pope arrived in Railton with a large moving van crammed with everything but books. Apparently these built-in bookcases in the CEO’s office can accommodate about a thousand, and the fact that he didn’t have any caused Dickie some slight embarrassment. He sensed that it wouldn’t be a good idea to fill the shelves with family photos and ceramic knickknacks. It occurred to him that Gracie DuBois might be of service, perhaps because she’d been utterly obsequious (“If there’s anything y’all need … anything a-tall …”) to both Dickie and his pale wife. And so Dickie commissioned her to find him some books at local auctions and the secondhand bookstores in State College and make sure they were all delivered to his office sometime in August, before the fall semester started. Which they were, late one afternoon, a physical plant minivan backing up to a rear entrance of the Administration Building, where two custodians off-loaded fifty boxes of books onto hand trucks, scooting them inside as quickly as possible, like a shipment of stolen VCRs. By the time the semester began, Dickie’s office was book-lined, floor to ceiling, as befitted the chief executive officer of an institution of higher learning. Even better, Jacob always concluded, unlike the books in Gatsby’s library, the pages of Dickie’s books had been not only cut but read, their margins full of sophomoric scribbling in a thousand undergraduate hands.

  I’ve not given much credence to this story until now. But in fact there seems to be no common denominator, no single intelligence that emerges from an examination of the books on these shelves, which seem not to have been organized, except perhaps by size and color. There are two copies of some books, including one by my father, which I take down and examine. It’s his first book of criticism, the one that put him on the map, the only really good one, according to my mother, who served as reader, sounding board, and editor, largely unrecognized, except in the fine print of the acknowledgments page, which lists her name among his other debts—to the university that awarded him release time to do the research, the Guggenheim Foundation, which funded its writing, and the writers’ colony that gave him (and not my mother) living space for a month one summer.

  In truth, the William Henry Devereaux, Sr., of the author photo doesn’t look like the type of fellow who’d require a lot of assistance, and that may be one of my father’s great gifts—his ability to suggest through a pose, a gesture, that he was himself all he needed. This appearance of self-sufficiency may even have been responsible for his success with young women in the various graduate programs in which he taught. Without being a strikingly handsome man, I suspect he managed to convey to them that whether they did or they didn’t was a matter of more concern to them than to him, and so of course they did. I understood why, having courted him too. This same self-sufficiency tormented me as a boy. If he was going somewhere, he made it clear that I could go along or not, as I chose, so I always chose to be near him, rather than my mother, whose company I preferred, because she paid attention to me. The fact that she seemed actually to like having me around, however, made her a less desirable companion when I had a choice between her and my father. I don’t recall how old I was before it dawned on me that my efforts to be close to my father were pointless for the simple reason that there was no getting close to him, not really. I probably would have come to this simple understanding sooner were it not for my mother, who hadn’t, I began to suspect, arrived at it herself.

  When I set William Henry Devereaux, Sr., down on the coffee table, another volume, farther down the shelf, attracts my attention. Its dust jacket—indeed the entire volume—is in pristine condition, and when I turn it over to examine the back panel, a serious-looking young man stares up at me with an intense, Rasputin-like gaze, suggestive of intolerance, superiority, and high seriousness. Had I tried, I now wonder, to strike a pose like my father’s on the jacket of his own first book? I seem to recall imagining that by dressing in jeans and a collarless shirt, and by having the long hair of the times, I’d offer a striking contrast to my betweeded scholar father, but my posture and attitude now strike me as his, donned, unlike the clothes, without thought. The caption below the author photo reads, “Henry Devereaux at home in Railton, PA.” The photo itself seems calculated to suggest that such a man would never be at home in Railton, PA. On the title page I encounter an inscription in my own hand. “For Finny,” it says. “With affection and admiration. Good luck.”

  I require a minute to remember why I might have wished Finny luck (the admiration and affection I take to be license). Then I remember we’d both come up for tenure and promotion to associate professor the same year, and everyone knew that Finny stood no chance. In the six years he’d been at the Railton Campus, he hadn’t finished the dissertation begun at the University of Pennsylvania, and about the only thing in his file was a letter from his dissertation director which said that he hadn’t given up on Finny and he hoped we wouldn’t either. I, on the other hand, with an authored book to my credit, was thought to be a shoo-in, even though I had brashly put myself up for promotion after just a year in residence. Predictably, though no one predicted it, Finny got his promotion that year and I was turned down, a circumstance that had so enraged me that, with Jacob Rose’s help (he’d become chair the next year), I put myself up for full professor, an act of such unprecedented and unmitigated arrogance that the committee approved it, thus effectively rooting me to the scene of the crime, too weighed down by tenure, rank, and salary to be marketable ever again.

  My own errors in judgment I can forgive, but Finny, the rat, has sold my book, a book I now vividly remember giving him in what I considered at the time to be a sweet, parting gesture, since no man was ever less tenurable than Finny.

  Oddly, my outrage at Finny is the only emotion I feel holding the book. The book. Without exactly putting me on the map, as my father’s first book did him, this modest little volume of mine did a good deal, deciding, to some degree, the destiny of both its author and its author’s family. Its acceptance brought us to Railton, and its advance started knocking down those first trees out in Allegheny Wells and bought the adjacent two lots I’ve since refused to sell and thus given impetus to the various petty English department feuds that have served as our substitute for genuine conflict. Not this actual volume I’m holding in my hand, of course, which has had about as ignominious a life as can befall a book. It’s been owned first by a man who apparently wouldn’t have it as a gift and then by a man who views it as interior decoration. Like Oliver Twist, it’s gone from a bad home to a worse one. When I hear Dickie’s voice in the outer office, giving instructions to his secretary, I slip the volume into my coat pocket.

  When he comes in, we shake hands again, rather too vigorously for the occasion, it seems to me, though it’s true I’m not sure, now that I’m here, what the occasion is. Is this my regularly scheduled, state-of-the-department annual meeting with the campus administration, or is it the meeting I’ve been warned about, where I will be apprized of the impending purge? Or will both these agenda items be put aside in order to discuss my recent television appearance and the embarrassment I’ve caused those who pay my salary?

  Dickie Pope seldom wears a jacket and tie, and he’s not wearing these now. His blue oxford button-down shirt is rolled into an artful three-quarter sleeve. His gray slacks are a miracle of pleating, and his cordovan loafers look like he bought them on the way to the campus this morning. He’s a studied regular guy, this Dickie, and as diminutive as his name.

  Collapsing onto one end of th
e sofa along the wall facing the bookshelves, he indicates that I’m free to occupy the other. “Lawyers and cops. Cops and lawyers. And I thought I was going to be an educator,” he moans theatrically, studying me as he does so. Surely this is a calculated tactic. I’m from the English department, and he’s probably concluded I don’t have much use for cops and lawyers. So, for the moment, neither does Dickie. Having established a common value system, maybe we can be friends. Maybe even do business. Who knows? In another ten or twenty minutes, maybe we’ll be all cuddly down at his end of the sofa. Either this is his thinking or he really doesn’t like cops and lawyers. “Who knew academic life would be so crazy?”

  “I had a pretty good idea,” I confess. “Both my parents were academics.”

  This simple intelligence bowls Dickie over. “No kidding? I didn’t know that.” He’s one stunned little CEO.

  “You’ve got one of my father’s books right here,” I say, picking up Devereaux Senior from the coffee table where I set him and handing him to Dickie.

  “I’ve got your novel up there too,” he says, giving Senior the once-over. “Did you notice?”

  He only thinks he does, actually. Devereaux Junior is resting comfortably in my coat pocket, his hard spine under my rib. I feel only a little disappointed to discover that Dickie apparently does have some knowledge of the books that reside upon his shelves, which means that Jacob Rose’s account of their acquisition is an exaggeration, if not an outright lie.

  “Tell me something,” Dickie says, tossing Senior back onto the coffee table, a little cavalierly it seems to me, at least for a man who has not himself authored a book, and therefore runs no risk of being himself tossed. “What’s your opinion of Lou Steinmetz?”

  I consider how to answer this.

  “Be honest,” Dickie urges. “It’s just us here.”

  “Well, he’s found a line of work that suits him,” I tell my new pal Dickie, who’s already moved us into the realm of confidentiality. “And he’s probably done less harm here than he’d have done someplace where they issue real bullets.”

  “Oh, the bullets are real enough,” Dickie assures me.

  “No kidding?” I say, my turn now to be bowled over. “Wow. And to think how I’ve been ragging him all these years. I better quit.”

  “Nah,” Dickie says, crossing one pleated leg over the other at the ankle. “From what I hear, you goad everybody.”

  I make what I hope is a smooth transition from bowled over to innocent, though my audience appears not to notice.

  “Between us?” he continues. We’re moving forward rapidly now, forging across the border of confidentiality and into intimacy. “When I watched you on television last night, I thought maybe you were goading me.”

  “But then you realized I wasn’t,” I add. For some reason I feel the need to supply the ending to his story.

  He recrosses his legs thoughtfully. “In fact, I asked my wife. I said, ‘Is this guy goading me?’ ”

  “Ah,” I say. “She was the one who realized?”

  “Anyway,” he continues, waving the whole goading issue away with the back of his hand. “Guess who I got a call from at seven o’clock this morning?”

  I can’t imagine he really wants me to guess. When I don’t, he doesn’t volunteer the information, however, and he’s grinning at me like I should know, so I take a flyer. “The chancellor?”

  “You got it,” he says, clearly gratified. “Guess what he wanted?”

  I take another flyer. “To know if there’s any way to fire a tenured full professor?”

  Dickie makes a hurt face. I’ve disappointed him. After first displaying prescience, I’ve now exhibited a surprising lack of imagination. “He wanted to apologize and assure me that I’ll have my budget soon. He wanted me to convey to you the complexity of our situation. You don’t have your budget because Jacob doesn’t have his budget because I don’t have my budget all the way up to the chancellor, who doesn’t have a budget because the legislature is dragging its feet. As per usual. The chancellor’s been promised a budget early next week, and he wanted to assure me that I’ll have mine by the end of that same week.”

  “That’s good news,” I say. “At a duck a day that means I only have to kill four or five ducks, and we’ve got close to thirty.”

  Dickie thinks this is pretty funny and laughs immoderately. I remain immoderately sober. If he’s at all disconcerted to be the only one laughing, he shows no sign. “No, seriously,” he says. “You did us all a favor, Hank. Last night—I admit it—I could have stabbed you through the throat with an ice pick, but the more I thought about it, the more I thought, we can use this.”

  “The throat?” I say. “With an ice pick?” I mean, after all, we’re sitting here on Dickie’s leather couch in the office of the chief executive officer of an institution of higher learning, as close to the heart of civilization as you can get without going to a better school.

  Dickie ignores me. “I mean I called you every name in the book at first. I said, ‘What’s that hmm-hmm-hmm-hmm-hmm’ trying to do to me?” He pauses, as if to allow me the opportunity to count the hmm’s and substitute expletives in the blanks so I’ll know what he called me. “But the more I thought about it, the more I thought, ‘This is funny.’ ”

  Since Dickie Pope has never given any indication of a sense of humor, I can only conclude that he does not think any of this is funny. Unless it’s funny in the same way that stabbing me through the throat with an ice pick would be funny. Beneath this performance, Dickie, I realize, is still in a black rage.

  “And then suddenly I’m laughing my ass off, this is so hmm-hmm funny. What am I worried about? I say to myself. A little humiliation? A little embarrassment with a state legislator? I mean, we’re all adults here, right?”

  I consider this to be another rhetorical question, but apparently it isn’t.

  “Am I right?” Dickie wants to know.

  “Absolutely,” I assure him.

  “So, I say, make use of it. Every problem contains its own solution. That’s the first rule every administrator learns.”

  “How many rules are there altogether?” I ask. I’m not an innocent, but I can play that role.

  He ignores me. “Ignore all smart-ass questions” may be one of the other rules. “And it’s not like we don’t have more serious problems to attend to,” he says.

  “No,” I agree. “It’s not like that.”

  “Speaking of which,” Dickie says, as if this digression has just occurred to him. “This rowdy department of yours. How many grievances do you have pending right now?”

  “Just against me,” I ask, “or against Teddy when he was chair?”

  He shrugs, generous. “The two of you.”

  “I’ve lost count,” I admit. “Fifteen? Twenty? Most of them are nuisance grievances.”

  “Nuisance,” Dickie says, leaning forward to stab my tweedy shoulder with an elegant index finger. “That’s the word. That’s the right hmm-hmm word for them. And so’s the union that nurtures them, though you may not agree with me.”

  No doubt about it. Now we’re getting somewhere. Because Dickie would not have made such an observation without having done some research. Sometime last night it’s occurred to him to wonder just who I am, this guy he wants to stab through the throat with an ice pick. I must be somebody, so who the hell am I? He’s made a call or two, and he’s learned that I was not in favor of union representation when the vote was taken over a decade ago. He may even know that I’ve been an outspoken critic of the kind of egalitarian spirit that has pervaded the institution since the union’s arrival. Or it could be he’s known these things about me for some time. Maybe last fall he wondered just who the hell this “Lucky Hank” guy was who was writing academic satires for the newspaper. Maybe he wanted to put an ice pick in the throat of this Lucky Hank character too. Regardless, if he’s taken the trouble to find out about my attitude toward the union, he’s also learned that I’m unpredictable, a genui
ne loose cannon. What he’d like to know now is just how loose. Can he afford me as a friend?

  “These things go in cycles,” I decide to say. “Every academic union should be tossed out after five years.” Then, before Dickie’s grin can spread too far, I add, “Then at the end of the next five years, all the university administrators should be booted out and another union voted in.”

  “That’s pretty cynical,” Dickie says, as if cynicism were a character trait he’d never have suspected in me until this moment. “Now, I believe in continuity and vision.”

  “Vision’s good,” I agree.

  “Take this place. You may be right about things moving in cycles,” he concedes. “This nuisance union, as you call it, has had our institution by the hmm-hmm for a long time. But anybody with vision”—he pauses here to point to his own right eye, which has narrowed with significance—“can see that things are changing. Forces of nature, Hank, pure and simple. We’re fresh out of baby boomers. The colleges that survive the decade are going to be lean and mean. Efficient.”