by Daniel Smith
Mr. Wonderful
a novel
Daniel Blake Smith
Copyright © 2018 Daniel Blake Smith.
All rights reserved. No part(s) of this book may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form, or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval systems without prior expressed written permission of the author of this book.
ISBN: 978-1-979765-60-2 (paperback)
for my father
“The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, and to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Mr. Wonderful
1 | Brian
Watching John Wayne and Henry Fonda in Fort Apache for at least the eighth time, my 93-year-old father stares listlessly at the TV. Even I’ve seen it twice and I hate old westerns. If you want to get my dad’s attention you’re way better off starting with some choice memories about cowboys and Indians on the big screen. But this time I try to engage him in conversation with sports—“how about those Cowboys?”—the pro football kind, once a big favorite of his—or brag on how well he’s doing with his physical therapy. I mostly get shrugs and silence. His hearing is mostly gone, and, besides, analyzing pro football or pondering his arm strength doesn’t really register on his rapidly shrinking mental landscape. He clears his throat with such force that you think his lungs will soon come spewing out of his mouth. “You want some tea, Dad?” He nods faintly, pointing to the pitcher of tea on a nearby coffee table.
As I pour his tea, I find myself standing directly under the large stuffed moose head that’s mounted on the wall above the TV. Dad killed it during one of his many hunting trips with his pals to British Columbia. It’s a ten point buck and its neck and head extend out so far into the room that he had the moose mounted high up on the wall so no one walking by would ever bump into it. There’s no sign of surprise or anger in the moose’s eyes; I wonder what it thinks as it looks down from its perch on the wall at its now enfeebled shooter.
Dad tried to make me a hunter early on. After buying me a 4-10 shot gun when I was 12, he let me join his quail hunting party. (My brother Jeff, at 8, was mercifully too young to join us.) My time as a bird hunter proved to be a near disaster. When the first covey of quail flew up right in front of us, I was so excited I whipped out my little gun and took a shot—barely missing my dad’s hunter friends who were right in front of me. Dad reamed me out a new one in front of everyone. To this day I’ve never again held a gun in my hands.
I’m sitting with Robert because his near-constant caregiver, his wife Claire, wanted a rare afternoon off to shop, get her hair done, and, no doubt, pretend for a few hours that she has a normal life away from her husband of 45 years. At 81, she is still beautiful, robust, and eternally optimistic. If it weren’t for her undying devotion to my father, he’d be languishing in a nursing home, drooling in his wheelchair like all the other overmedicated “patients” waiting out their final days. Instead, he’s at home where he’s treated to non-stop attention and love. “Mr. Wonderful,” Claire calls him, an amazing rebranding of a man I would have more nearly called, “Mr. I’m In Charge” or “Dr. You Don’t Know What You’re Doing.” Robert was a family doctor who set broken bones, pinned hips, delivered babies, and listened to hearts and lungs for half a century in the small town of Juniper, Texas. He was a pillar of the community and he, along with everyone else, knew it. If you didn’t agree with him, you’d soon hear his often irritated response that he knew better than you: “use your head for something besides a hat rack,” was one of the kinder ways he would inform his sons that we just weren’t thinking right.
So hearing Claire call him “Mr. Wonderful,” jolts me to the core. Does she know something, see something, that neither I nor my brother ever witnessed? I guess being Dad’s spouse, partner in life, makes all the difference in the world. As Dad carefully sips his tea, while glancing at John Wayne scowling at Henry Fonda’s kind treatment of the Indians, I find myself looking at my watch: Claire will be back in just an hour.
My visit concluded—I just stepped in for a day or two to help out my poor stepmom—I catch a flight back home to St. Louis, where I teach American history at Eastern Missouri State University. On the flight home, I try to focus on my usual to-do list—is my lecture ready on the Great Awakening, have I finished the letters of recommendation I’ve been postponing for weeks?—but the image of my dad’s vacant stare keeps popping up and how utterly different a man he used to be. Yes, Fort Apache was a film he always liked but, hell, he belonged in that movie, not watching it. The classic strong, silent type, he could have been John Wayne or Henry Fonda. A Navy pilot in World War II, a college basketball star, a successful doctor and respected father who taught his sons in no uncertain terms what it took to be a man—all this and more is now reduced to a sad, quiet elderly figure watching television as time runs out on him.
I know, this is where we’re all headed if we’re “lucky” to live so long. But who wants longevity at such an expense? “If I get like that,” I tell my wife Corinne, “put me out of my misery. Smother me with a pillow in the middle of the night.”
“I’m not committing a murder to honor your selfish interests,” she says. “I’m not going to prison over your death wishes.”
But, you know, I keep saying I’m right. There’s nothing good in the slow death that passes for my dad’s final stage of life.
By the time my plane lands in St. Louis, I’m in full refocus mode. Taking three days off to fly to Texas to visit my dad may have earned me some valuable face time with Dad and my stepmother, but I’m now already behind in my work for the week. It’s a relief when I spot our little blue Camry pull up outside baggage claim, especially knowing Corinne has come to pick me up. I swear she looks younger than any 50 year old I know, and I give her a fierce hug and a kiss.
“Wow. Maybe you should go away more often,” she says.
“You wish.”
“So, how is he doing?” she asks.
“Why don’t we stop at Pappy’s for some takeout?”
“That bad, huh?”
Corinne knows how to live, how to focus, how to survive. We met at Donahue’s, a greasy pub in grad school at Virginia. She was finishing law school; I was trying to write a dissertation—at the pub. Which, I guess, explains why it took me so long to finish the damn thing. Besides, I had recently divorced, which made me a truly pathetic bar fly. Like a lot of my friends in our small Texas town, I decided that upon graduation, marrying my high school sweetheart, Shelly Ann Benson, was a no-brainer. It was in the sense that it apparently involved no brains. Shelly Ann followed me to graduate school but as I became increasingly caught up with the nuances of history, she decided all she wanted to do was some occasional waitressing on the weekends. With me reading up on republicanism in the American Revolution and Shelly Ann worrying about the bartender stealing her tips at the local pub, it didn’t take long for us to have very little to talk about. After a few short years, as we predictably grew apart, she eventually wandered off with a waiter at Applebee’s and moved to Houston. And that was that.
So I had to look like a big problem as I sat drinking cheap Merlot at Donahue’s. And Corinne must have been feeling especially lonely as she let me hit on her with my lame “ABD (all but dissertation) personal story.” She drank me under the table that night and I knew right away this was one formidable woman. She could take apart any argument I made—and I love to argue—and turn me into an advocate of her own position. It was a truly dizzying experience.
Once Corinne and I developed a serious relationship, we talked about having a family together. I wanted kids bad—I’m not sure why except perhaps to see what would happ
en if I raised them completely differently from how Dad dealt with us—while Corinne seemed more ambivalent. Maybe it was the lawyer in her but she smelled trouble and worry better than anyone I knew. And Lord knows, children offer up a bounty of both. As it turned out, we learned after a couple of years trying that she couldn’t have children. When I suggested adoption, she nearly freaked out. “Kids have enough trouble coming from their own intact homes,” she told me. “Why burden them with the lifelong worry of who their real parents are?” I wasn’t giving in and she knew that at least for me, unless we adopted this would be a big hole in our marriage. So she relented and we adopted a baby boy we named Danny. I doted on him, thinking he even looked a bit like me. He was going to be my only legacy and so he had to be special. Though she had basically made a “deal” to adopt little Danny to enlarge our marriage into a family, Corinne did her best to raise our boy with as much enthusiasm as she could muster knowing his origins were not related to us. At first, our biggest problem was that Danny—pampered and treated as special, perhaps in compensation for being adopted—suffered badly from being an only: he craved attention, he expected—and got—everything, and he was impervious to discipline, or at least the half-hearted kind I dished out. Corinne was a different matter. Sure enough, we fought like dogs over disciplining Danny. “You have to actually have rules, Brian, or these little fuckers will run right over you.”
“He’s not a ‘little fucker,’ Corinne, and our house isn’t a courtroom.”
“It ain’t no playground either, Bri.”
Somehow, we survived numerous emergency calls from school when Danny got into fights, refused to go to math class, or simply slept through it. Perseverance, I told Corinne, was 90% of the law. “That’s possession, Brian, but in the world of parenting maybe you’re right.” When he finally graduated, we were the ones opening up the champagne. “I didn’t think we’d ever get him out of high school,” Corinne said. “Somebody’s blood—his, mine, or yours, was going to be on the floor.”
“So are you celebrating,” I asked her at the time, “because he graduated or because he’s gone?”
“Can’t it be both?”
Flash forward a dozen years, Danny has already gone through a marriage and a half dozen jobs, but when he’s not begging us for money he’s regaling his friends on Facebook that he’s gearing up “for the next big chapter in my life.” That chapter will start playing out in east Arkansas where his latest “squeeze” parks her RV.
“Aren’t you done propping up Danny?” Corinne announced not long after he moved in with Dawn, a waitress in Boaz.
“When it comes to your kids, sweetheart, you’re never done.”
And for that bit of parental wisdom, I received a full evening of cold-shouldered silence.
My office is a mess, but then I’ve always prided myself on focusing on ideas not order. To anyone else, my desk looks like it’s been ransacked, but to me everything truly important can be located. My upcoming lecture on Class Conflict in the Making of the Constitution that I’m still tinkering with sits near the edge of my computer; a half-dozen still-unfinished letters of recommendation over by the phone; several days of unopened mail lies on top of a group of books I’m consulting—well, sort of—for my several “in-progress” book projects; and a huge pile of blue exam books, unartfully stacked around yet another collection of books, dominate the scene. God, there is nothing I hate more than grading, even if those grades are, in fact, practically the only thing my students care about.
I consider dipping into the 40-odd blue books from the midterm for my US survey history course, but instead stare out my third floor window of the Faculty Office Building and gaze at all the half-dressed students lounging around the fountain and surrounding gardens, some sunbathing, others texting or staring at their phones, talking with friends, a few actually looking at a book. No wonder people think of college—and college teaching—as a low stakes activity.
I casually open one blue book and read on the very first page that, apparently, the American Revolution’s central message was that “Americans just weren’t going to put up with a bunch of British twits telling us how to live.” Idiotic, yes, but I have definitely seen worse.
Thankfully, just at that moment, there’s a knock at my door. In comes Gillian Thompson, my teaching assistant. She knows full well not to blame the Revolution on British twits, but she’s nearly clueless about how to teach the first-generation undergraduates that populate good ol’ Eastern Missouri. “Dr. Fenton, I’ve got this student in 108, Billy Watkins—”
“Wait: Watkins. The guy who skipped the first hour exam and is constantly on his cell during class?”
“Yeah. He’s definitely working on an attitude.”
“You mean he’s working on an F.”
“Anyway, now he refuses to come to the TA sections and told me he just won’t accept being marked down for missing those classes. Any ideas?”
“’Won’t accept’ it, huh? It’s not really an offer, Gillian, which would call for acceptance or decline. You INFORM him that he’s being docked a letter grade for missing class. That’s pretty much the end of it.”
“If I did that, you know, just ‘informed’ him like that, well, I’m pretty sure there’d be a real price to pay,” Gillian observes darkly.
“’Price’?”
“He’d tear us apart on the evaluation, Sir. Me and you.”
“Oh. Right. Well, in that case, you should just tell him to come to class whenever he can or feels like it, and reassure him he’ll be getting the A that his demanding standards will naturally produce.”
“Excuse me?”
“Flunk the sonofabitch. If he complains, tell him to come see me.”
“Wow, I just, I just”—
“You just what? Don’t have the balls to tell him the truth?”
At that, Gillian starts to tear up. I hand her a Kleenex. “Are you sure you’re cut out for this, Gillian? You can’t be afraid of the students, you know.” God, I don’t mean to provoke tears in my graduate students. Gillian’s got real potential; I just feel the responsibility to tell her what lies ahead.
“I didn’t come to grad school to have these sorts of confrontations. I just wanted to study comparative slave systems.”
“Yeah, well, the sad truth, Gillian, is that we have to somehow teach the Billy Watkins of the world so that we can enjoy our time studying slavery in Brazil and South Carolina.”
Gillian, shaking her head, starts to leave deeply disappointed with the obvious mistake she’s made in pursuing a Ph.D.
“Hey, it’s going to be okay,” I reassure her. “You’ll be fine, Gillian.”
I wander down to the coffee room hoping not to run into any of my colleagues. Not that I dislike them—some of them are quite smart, even humorous and engaging. But over the years—with the comings and goings of faculty through various searches, failed tenure efforts, retirements, and the occasional departures for other colleges—the cumulative effect is that I have become depressed being around their preening sense of self-importance stuck as they are in a second-rate university. I make a quick pit stop in the men’s room. I look in the mirror over the lavatory and am suddenly struck with how different I look, how old I seem. I have a full head of hair—doubtless owing to my Cherokee roots (well, one eighth, anyway)—and only a few wrinkles around the eyes. I smile, then frown, then stare at the weary, slightly anxious, face reflected in the mirror. I turn sixty at the end of the term. Thirty-one years (62 semesters) of college teaching. Pulling down a pathetic $69,000. I could have been a truck driver and made that kind of money years ago. But then I get to hear my colleagues pontificate about the Enlightenment and the social construction of gender. Not going to find truckers chatting about that over Red Bull at the Travel Mart.
On my way out of the bathroom, I’m greeted by the mellifluous voice of Pat Jensen, our chairman.
“Hey, Brian. Got a minute?”
I cannot think of a worse way to start the da
y than a confab with Pat Jensen. Affable but always the bearer of bad news, Pat gave up on his own research agenda ten years ago, grew an unconvincing beard, and now hunkers down in the chair’s office counting beans and studying teaching evaluations. Raised in New Jersey but trained as an historian of early modern England, Pat has come to adopt a curious British accent, as if his fake courtly manner somehow elevated his thoughts beyond their mind-numbing bureaucratic origins.
Pat gestures to a chair across from his oversized and underused oak desk to a small padded chair. “Please, have a seat, Brian.” There are portraits of Henry VIII and Charles I on the wall. Like every history professor on the planet, he has more books than can be easily fit on his massive book shelves. “Have you read all these books, Professor?” I almost ask him—the question that virtually all undergraduates ask us once they’re stuck for any time in our book intimidation chamber.
“Been a while since we chatted, Brian.”
“Oh has it? I hadn’t noticed,” I reply.
“Busy semester. But then aren’t they all?”
“There must be a reason”—
“As a matter of fact,” Pat responds, pulling on his scraggly beard. “I’ve been going through the evaluations from the executive committee.” He gives me an over-the-top pregnant pause. I don’t bite, so it’s several seconds of crickets. “So I guess I’ve got some concerns.” I stare at Henry VIII’s self-satisfied mug and make a mental note about the origins of Pat’s emotional problems. “The thing is, they’re giving you strictly a ‘meets expectation’ eval. And considering what the students have been saying about you, that might be a gift.”
“Look, I work the students hard but when they perform I reward them well. Which is how life should be—even here in the history department.”