Straight Man

by Richard Russo

  After the midway, my father and I had only one other interesting conversation, and that took place in my imagination the day I got out of the hospital and returned home with Lily and Angelo. After we finally convinced Finny that nobody blamed him for Occam’s death, and after I’d foolishly promised I’d read his dissertation when he finished it, I gathered Occam up in the sheet and carried him around back of the house and down to the edge of the woods, where I dug the animal’s grave. It took me about an hour, and cost a pair of loafers and my favorite chinos. I was standing thigh deep in the hole when I looked up and saw William Henry Devereaux, Sr., leaning forward heavily on the railing of the back deck, watching me work. Lily and Angelo (who’d wanted to help) and my mother were there too, but they might just as well not have been. This little vignette had clearly been arranged for the benefit of the two William Henry Devereauxs.

  We were some fifty yards apart, too far for him to see me clearly, and at that distance, to his aging eyes, I must have reminded my father very much of the man who buried my first dog forty years ago. In truth, as I have admitted, I’ve come to greatly resemble my father, and my soft professor’s hands were now as blistered as his had become so long ago. He could not have failed to note the parallel events or to misread their significance. I had tried to be unlike him, but look at me. “This is my son,” I heard my father think, in character as always, overestimating the importance of his own role in any proceeding, “in whom I am well pleased.”

  Well, it’s easy to send thoughts downhill. He had the advantage of being stationed above, on the deck, whereas I was below at the edge of the woods, hip deep in a hole, my eyes stinging with salt. So I had to work harder to order a thought and power it up the sloping lawn. “Oh, yeah?” I replied. “Well, I didn’t have to go borrow a shovel, old man.”

  But truly grateful people don’t make lists of things to be grateful for, any more than happy people make lists of things to be happy about. Happy people have enough to do just being happy.

  Growing old, as someone once remarked, is not for sissies, but age is not the issue so much as diminishment. This summer provided William Henry Devereaux, Jr., with two athletic milestones (I’m not counting the basketball game). Before leaving for Atlanta, Julie administered to her father a sound drubbing in tennis, an inevitable defeat I’d been postponing with smoke and mirrors for nearly a decade. One bright, warm Sunday afternoon, in a two set match that took just under an hour, Julie ran her fifty-year-old father back and forth from sideline to sideline, net to baseline, with a cruel efficiency that was entirely unlike her. I knew I was beat when I realized she wasn’t listening to me, which is not the same thing as reminding herself not to listen to me, which is what she’d always done before. For ten years I’d been able to get her to double-fault by warning her not to, but that afternoon she found a way to tune me out on the tennis court as efficiently as she used to at the dinner table when I recommended books. Only when the match was over and she’d done what she hadn’t quite dared to believe was possible did she finally break into the kind of radiant smile calculated to break a father’s heart. “That’s for what you did to Russell,” she grinned at me on the way home, and for a moment, until I remembered the basketball game in which he put a hook shot up on the roof behind the backboard, I thought she was talking about my running him out of town after I found him at Meg Quigley’s.

  Worse than defeat is concession. This summer, after jogging all spring so that I might retain my spot in left field, I have voluntarily made the move to first base, a position I mastered so effortlessly that I reinforced Phil Watson’s erroneous conclusion that I was born to play there. I was not. On first, the philosophical issues are competence, reliability, patience, and faith, but alas there is little poetry. There is satisfaction to be derived from digging an errant throw out of the dirt, but the heart doesn’t leap when the hitter turns on a pitch and lifts the ball high and far enough for a man like me to feel awe and wonder. Watson’s nephew has acquitted himself well enough in my left field. At the beginning of the season he had twice my speed and half my judgment, which meant the team was no better off, but as Watson correctly observed, his nephew’s judgment would improve with experience, whereas I was all done getting faster.

  Late one night on my deck, after Lily said good night, a bottle of good Irish whiskey between us, Tony Coniglia, who’d come over to say farewell before going to Pittsburgh for a year as a sabbatical leave replacement, tried to explain it all to me in what would have been another of his long, patented riffs, if I hadn’t been in a quarrelsome mood. “We have entered,” he explained, “the Season of Grace.

  “Consider Beowulf,” he went on. “There comes a time in every warrior’s life when he realizes he doesn’t have his best stuff anymore. He thinks he’s the same guy that whupped Grendel, but he’s not. If he were honest, he’d have to admit he could no longer take Grendel’s mother in a fair fight.”

  “Beowulf did defeat Grendel’s mother,” I couldn’t help reminding him. “And she was one tough broad, too.”

  “Huh,” Tony said. “Beowulf defeated Grendel’s mother?”

  “It was a clear victory, as I recall.”

  “Ah!” he said, remembering now, pointing his finger at me as if I were to blame for his faulty memory. “It was the dragon he lost to.”

  Unfortunately, my own recollection of Beowulf was not much better than his. “I think he kills the dragon too, though he himself is mortally wounded.”

  “Then that’s my point,” Tony said, narrowing his eyes at me. “It’s the dragon that’s my point. Beowulf was a fool to fight the dragon. By then he was an old warrior.”

  “No,” I assured him. “The point seems to have been that he was a hero for fighting the dragon.”

  He was glaring at me now. It actually seemed possible that we could have angry words over Beowulf. “But his skills were diminished. The time for deeds had passed. He had entered the Season of Grace but did not have the grace to admit it.”

  “He died a warrior’s death. That was his grace.”

  Tony took a long swig from the bottle, considered my pigheaded views. “Okay, fuck Beowulf. There are no more warriors anyhow.”

  With this I could agree. “There are no more Grendels,” I pointed out. “Men our age can’t even find a good Grendel’s mother. God knows what we’ll do when we’re the age to look for dragons.”

  “No dragons for me,” Tony said. “I’ve entered the Season of Grace.”

  “You and Jacob,” I nodded.

  “He’s merely entered Gracie. That’s not the same thing,” he said, before becoming philosophical again. “No, youth is the Season of Deeds. The question youth asks is: Who am I? In the Season of Grace we ask: What have I become?”

  “And what have we become?”

  “I have become very drunk.”

  “Then don’t drive home,” I insisted. “Stay here tonight. Drive back in the morning.”

  “I accept your invitation, for one reason and one reason only. Do you know what that reason is?”

  “Because this is the Season of Grace?”

  He grinned at me drunkenly. “You’ve always been my best student.”

  And so, I conclude, if William Henry Devereaux, Jr., is less than ecstatically happy, less grateful for his myriad blessings than he should be to the Bestower of Said Blessings, it must be because he has not fully accepted his good friend’s invitation to join him and Nolan Ryan and Dr. J. and Nadia Comaneci, and all the others who have lost their best stuff, in entering the Season of Grace.

  I am, however, relatively at peace with who and what I’ve become, thanks to a series of events that occurred back in May. One rainy Saturday morning Yolanda Ackles, Tony Coniglia’s former student, attempted suicide by stepping in front of a car at the bottom of the steep hill that leads up to Tony’s house. The driver, who owned a car identical in color and make to Tony’s and who must have been preternaturally alert, saw her when she stepped out from behind a tree. He st
ood on the brakes, but even so he knocked her through the intersection. He later described for the police the way she had calmly stepped out into the street and turned to face his oncoming car, a beatific smile on her face, her arms out as if to embrace him, a sight more horrifying to him than her body when she finally came to rest in an unnatural position against the opposite curb. Everyone who saw the accident said it was a miracle that she had not been killed. Witnesses testified that at one point she sat up and smiled before passing out. At the hospital she was found to have sustained a fractured ankle, a broken collarbone, a severe concussion, and multiple lacerations. None of her injuries was life threatening.

  Later that morning, however, Tony Coniglia was admitted to the same hospital with heart fibrillations, and because of his cardiac history he was kept overnight for observation. He returned home the next afternoon with a prescription for a mild tranquilizer and instructions not to play racquetball with me for the rest of the summer. That evening Jacob Rose called and suggested I join him in paying Tony a visit. Maybe he’d invite one or two of Tony’s other friends. Together we’d cheer him up. Since Russell happened to be in town for the weekend, I invited him to come along. It had occurred to me that he might be able to get Tony’s computer to function.

  By the time we arrived, the house was full of men, and the atmosphere bordered, inappropriately enough, on festive. Jacob, acting as host, met us at the door with a glass of whiskey in his hand. “I thought I told you to bring the pizza,” he said.

  “I could go get some,” Russell offered.

  Jacob cocked his head at me. “I’ve got no idea who this kid is, but I like him.” He turned to Russell then, extending his hand. “I’ve spent most of the day talking to the board of trustees, and you’re the first person to take anything I’ve said seriously. I was joking about the pizza, but how were you to know?”

  Inside, I introduced Russell around. There were a couple fellows from Tony’s department, one each from Psych and Chemistry, as well as a few from English. Across the room I witnessed something I hadn’t seen in years—Teddy Barnes and Paul Rourke in what appeared to be pleasant conversation. Or if not pleasant, at least nonadversarial. Mike Law, looking morose, but no more so than when he was married to Gracie, was also there.

  There were no women, which was good. I would not have liked this convivial scene to be reported. If I understood correctly, we’d gathered to assure our friend and colleague that what happened to Yolanda Ackles was not his fault. This we might have managed to do if we had come one at a time, or even perhaps if the gathering had stayed small. But males who come together in numbers this large, without the civilizing presence of women, are genetically unable to sustain the solemnity of any occasion once the whiskey has been located. To look at us, you’d have sworn we didn’t care a jot about what happened to poor Yolanda Ackles. It looked like we’d closed ranks around one of our own, and perhaps this was what we’d done, though I doubt it was what we meant to do. I could tell Russell was confused by the merriment. He suspected there was some aspect to the proceedings that I hadn’t told him about, though he wasn’t sure enough of himself just then to be critical. During the whole weekend Russell seemed more determined to get back into my good graces than Julie’s, which was another reason I’d taken him along with me, to show him there were no hard feelings. He and Julie both seemed tremendously relieved to be back together again.

  When Tony spotted us, he came over and I introduced him to Russell, explaining that my son-in-law was a computer guy and suggesting that Russell take a look at Tony’s system while I got us a drink. Fifteen minutes later I poked my head into the spare bedroom, where I found Russell under the table, fiddling with the back of the computer, his bristly cranium just visible above the machine, the top of which he had removed. Tony himself I found outside on the back deck, sitting on the edge of the quiet hot tub, alone.

  “I’ve been thinking about going back to Brooklyn,” he said, raising his glass so we could clink. “The problem is, the Brooklyn I’d like to return to doesn’t exist anymore.”

  “Should you be drinking?” I wondered.

  “This is iced tea,” he admitted. “Do you ever yearn to return to that horrible place in the Midwest where you were born?”

  “Never,” I told him, the simple, honest truth. Of course I had no recollection of it either. We’d moved by the time I was two, and by the time I was three we’d moved again.

  “Most people are one way or the other,” Tony explained. “They either want to confront the past or escape it.”

  I could feel one of Tony’s long, scientific disquisitions, full of clinical observations and invented statistics, coming on, so I took a good, long pull of bourbon and settled in.

  “I’d like to meet that woman again,” he told me. “Did I tell you about her?”

  “You came before she could get out of her brassiere.”

  He nodded sadly. “She must have touched me, though,” he said. “I don’t remember her touching me, but I think minimal physical contact would have been necessary.”

  “If you don’t remember—” I began, though he wasn’t really listening.

  “I think I must have flirted with Yolanda Ackles,” he said, staring out at the dark woods beyond his house. “I don’t remember doing it, but you may have noticed I’m a flirtatious man. I have even flirted with your wife upon occasion.”

  “And you remember doing it,” I pointed out, adding, “so do I.”

  “Well,” he conceded. “Perhaps. But I can’t help thinking that what happened to that young woman may be my fault.”

  “I know you,” I told him with as much conviction as I could summon. “If you flirted with Yolanda Ackles, you did it to make her feel good about herself.”

  “You think so?” he said. “You think I did it to make her feel good? Not to make me feel good?”

  “I’m sure of it,” I told him. I know you, Al. You’re not the kind of man who.

  We looked each other in the eye then, both shrugging at the same instant. “I think that woman must have taken me in her hand,” Tony says. “It stands to reason.”

  One of the things you never know for sure in life is whether a joke is the right thing. Sometimes even after you’ve offered one. I can only say that I was too delighted to have caught Tony in an ambiguous pronoun reference to refrain. “I’m sure it was standing,” I told my friend. “But not to reason.”

  Back inside, the living room had been abandoned. We found everyone crammed into the spare room, where Russell was watching Tony’s computer scroll, jammed to the margins of the screen with keyboard symbols that materialized below, inched upward line by line, and disappeared into the top of the screen. You almost expected to see the same lines appear, intact, in the air above the monitor, scrolling up the wall and along the ceiling.

  The small room was very crowded with men watching this bizarre sight as if it were a feat of magic. Several more friends of Tony’s had arrived, and from out in the hall we could hear the doorbell. I saw that Billy Quigley was there and had cornered his new dean and was reading him the drunken riot act. I overheard the word peckerwood, a term I had always assumed Billy reserved for me.

  To William Henry Devereaux, Jr., the whole scene took on a surreal quality. Dreams, it is said, are all meaning, and I couldn’t help thinking that that’s what this scene must be, some form of concentrated significance. I thought maybe if I concentrated I could figure it out. I knew these men. I’d known most of them for twenty years. When we met we were all married. A few of us still were. A few more were divorced. A few more were remarried and trying again. Some of us had betrayed fine women. Some of us had been ourselves betrayed. But here we were, tonight at least, drawn together by some need, as if we were waiting for a sign. And I was one of their number.

  Russell pushed back his chair, confessing, “I don’t understand this.”

  And then suddenly we were all chuckling, probably at the sight gag that accompanied his words, the computer�
��s packed screen still scrolling upwards.

  “No, I mean, this should work,” Russell explained, having concluded perhaps that the laughter was directed at him.

  “Maybe it is working,” Jacob Rose suggested. “I think you’ve hacked your way into God’s mainframe. This is a list of our options. All we need to do is break the code.”

  And maybe it was so much laughter, so many of us bewildered, middle-aged men using up the oxygen in such a tiny room, but all at once we seemed to realize how close it was in there, and just as suddenly we all wanted out. Only when we turned toward the exit did we realize our predicament. The bedroom door opened inward, toward us, but we’d moved too close to it. There wasn’t room.

  “Trapped,” I heard a droll voice say. “Like rats.”

  “Everybody back up,” another voice suggested, but those in the back of the room either didn’t hear the request or didn’t understand its necessity. Everyone knew where the door was and continued to press toward it and imagined freedom. Suddenly, everyone was talking, laughing, shouting panicky, desperate, half-joking obscenities. “Help!” yelled someone near the center of the room, perhaps in jest.

  Normally I’m subject to the kind of blind claustrophobic panic that then filled the room, but I happened at that moment to catch the eye of Paul Rourke across the room, and when I grinned, he tried valiantly to smother a grin of his own. For twenty years he’d steadfastly maintained that anything I thought was funny most assuredly was not, and I could tell he felt his twenty-year resolve crumbling. I could see him let it go, and his big, mean-spirited face broke into the widest imaginable grin, and his shoulders began to bounce up and down.

  Clearly, the only solution was for all of us to take one step backward so that the door could be pulled open. By this point a group of plumbers, a group of bricklayers, a group of hookers, a group of chimpanzees would have figured this out. But the room contained, unfortunately, a group of academics, and we couldn’t quite believe what had happened to us.