Testimony and Demeanor

by John D. Casey

  I tried a few jokes of my own. She laughed politely. She had a beautiful polite laugh—as she sensed a punch line coming she would store up her polite laugh behind her large white teeth and then slowly unbite it.

  I told her that on a poem of mine that I had submitted to a poet-teacher I admired, she had written, “A gracefully minted coin—of small denomination.”

  Honorée opened her teeth. “Oh, that’s wonderful!”

  I tried to think of bons mots of which I had not been the butt. A friend of mine—at least someone I knew—said of Mary McCarthy’s oeuvre, “All her romans have feet of clé.” I had to explain this to Honorée, while she wrote it down on a napkin.

  I told her that I’d heard someone say (I knew someone who’d heard someone say) à propos of a philosophy grad student who stayed married to a shrew because she was typing his thesis, “That’s putting Descartes before divorce.”

  “Oh, Mr. Hendricks,” Honorée said, “did you really hear that?”

  I said, “Yes.”

  “Well, tell me, Mr. Hendricks, was this because—I mean, tell me honestly—is this because it was just men talking to each other? Are men wittier than women?”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was the person who said this in college or graduate school? I mean, did they get that way by trying? Can you get that way by trying?”

  I cleared my throat. I said, “Don’t you think, Miss Hogentogler, that the phrase ‘natural sophistication’ is suspect? And in any event this sort of thing isn’t of the essence. Why are you so concerned about …”

  “Oh, Mr. Hendricks, I don’t know why.”

  It was a silly question on my part. An unfair question. I knew she had a crush on me. I was lonely. I was still finishing my thesis and worked long hours—not hard, but long. Something about me irritated my new colleagues. I had the coiled shyness of an only child who had gone to a large boarding school and a large university and who had learned to observe critically at a very early age. If others observed me as I observed them, I had every reason to be wary.

  I was born of handsome parents who lived a careful—or do I mean carefree?—life and who didn’t discover I was very little trouble until I was thirteen. At that point—during vacations—there came a sudden vault into grown-up worlds. My mother said to her cousin Josie (a woman I adored), “You know, Oliver’s manners are so good I can take him anywhere.”

  When I was fourteen this cousin took me out to lunch. She was a beautiful woman—or at least glamorous in the style that was then just passing: large shiny lips framed in rouged cheeks and a massive set of hair, broad shoulders swaggering with fur. She was as impressive as a ship entering a small harbor.

  I choose that simile for a reason. My first effort to entertain this magnificent woman was this: Why is the Queen Mary coming into dock like a woman getting into her girdle? Answer: Because it takes a lot of little tugs.

  Cousin Josie laughed politely. She said, “Well, I certainly hope you didn’t have me in mind.”

  I blushed. It was a childish joke. I struggled to get to the surface of my feelings. I often had the sensation of drowning in a turbulent river of my feelings in her presence. In fact, her presence and my feelings were one fast-flowing confusion.

  I said I didn’t imagine she wore a girdle.

  She laughed. I sensed her small ripple of pleasure. It engulfed me.

  I popped back up to say that there was something she could tell me that I was curious about: what did it really feel like to be a beautiful woman?

  She laughed again, but she was pleased on a larger scale. I was ready and dog-paddled to the crest of this wave.

  She said, “Well, that’s awfully sweet … but it’s a hard question. It reminds me—a friend of mine asked me once what it was like to kiss a man with a mustache.”

  The thought of cousin Josie kissing a man with or without a mustache submerged me again.

  She said, “I told her it was like eating an oyster with a toothbrush. Oh, dear—I shouldn’t have said that. Oh, well.”

  I didn’t get it. Kissing was still a mystery to me. I thought, for some reason, that you sucked your lips dry before applying them.

  Later on during lunch I told Josie she reminded me of Fabrizio’s aunt in The Charterhouse of Parma. She hadn’t read it, so I had the pleasure of telling her the plot. I turned it to fit what I took to be the facts of our case even more snugly.

  Although cousin Josie was considered by my parents to be racy (she was divorced and talked about men and women a lot), she was in fact a conventional woman. She remarried when I was sixteen, after the fever of my affections had peaked. I had carried a torch for her for more than a year and a half. During that time I wrote poems to her, one of which I finally mailed. By that time I had learned a complete version of the facts of life—second-hand, to be sure, but I think they struck a richer chord than any possible first-hand encounter might have. But what I had learned at fifteen and a half was enough to push some of the poems I wrote from the ethereal to the erotic.

  At Thanksgiving, cousin Josie took me aside for a talk. We went to the library and she closed the door. She half sat on my father’s desk. She asked how I liked school. I felt that for the first time I might have the upper hand. It was a wonderful nervous sensation. Josie finally took the poem out of her pocketbook. The plot was not entirely original—a young man falls in love with the statue of a goddess, who comes to life and loves him for his love which brought her to life.

  Josie put on her glasses to read. Watching the stems slither under her hair, finding their way between the top of her ear and her scalp, was a light sea I took well.

  Josie looked up and said, “You know, I showed this to a friend of mine who knows a lot about poetry and he said that you have a lot of talent—he was amazed when I told him you’re only fifteen.”

  I said, “I didn’t think you’d show it to your friends.”

  She said, “Well, I was a little worried about it. You see, I may have been a little dumb. I’m afraid I may not have understood. This may sound awfully silly … you see, I’ve always been just as fond of you as I could be.”

  I turned away and paced impatiently. It was a gesture only; I still didn’t know what was bound to come.

  Josie said, “I may be wrong, but it seems to me now you may be trying out your feelings—I remember very well how strong and confusing these growing-up feelings can be—and I certainly don’t want to hurt your feelings, but I don’t want you to be hurt by your own feelings either. And I’m afraid that they may have been getting …” She squeezed her lips together and turned the palm of one hand up.

  I interrupted. “I’m not ‘trying out’ feelings. I’m writing about—”

  Josie said, “Well, yes. But when you write this—it’s really very good, you know—when you write this:

  ‘His fingertips that brush the pale marmoreal skin

  Burn suddenly with fleshly fire

  And change the touch that had been dreaded sin

  To higher right and better law—Desire!’

  Well, all I can think is that it wouldn’t really be like that in real life—”

  “It would,” I said. “It would because—”

  “Oliver,” she said, cautioning me.

  “It’s you!” I said.

  I felt that this revelation would undo her. I had seen her nerves. But behind her nerves she was horribly self-possessed. I realized a little later that she’d been prepared for any declaration I had the power to make.

  She said, “I know you’re so sweet that I just can’t be cross. But you really shouldn’t let yourself get carried away.…”

  While she was talking I considered what else I could do. I had another poem, but that was out. It went further in some ways—it was a shipwreck poem, in which only two reach a desert shore. I also knew that now I was much less interested in long-term love—I had come to see several flaws in her in
the last minute—but I was all the more interested in a real kiss.

  Josie said, “Real feelings are much more complicated—the feelings a woman has for a man have to do with so many more emotions.… There has to be more or there really just isn’t real feeling at all.”

  That was certainly the catechism of the fifties. I believed it. I believed she believed it and that she was right to believe it. In fact, the most complicated parts of my imagining were not the physical setting (loose togas, storm-tattered skirt, etc.); they were rather the array of other emotions I devised for her to feel for me: gratitude, pity, amusement, curiosity—even family loyalty. I always imagined at least a half dozen concurrent feelings to shore up the plausibility of her one giddy spark of dangerous affection. So I was irritated when she told me: “Real feelings are much more complicated.”

  Irritated, but helpless. Because while she’d been talking I’d had to admit to myself that I didn’t have the courage to try to kiss her. I was as tall as she was, but I was thin and I had the terrible feeling that she was stronger than I was.

  It had also crossed my mind to tell her either that I was so miserable that I was going to leave school for good or that one of the masters had tried to seduce me and that I was in desperate need of reassurance. I wasn’t sure why I couldn’t try these tacks; I just knew I couldn’t.

  I said, “Give me back the poem.”

  She handed it to me and I tore it up.

  She said, “Oh, Ollie.”

  I said, “Don’t call me that.”

  She pushed herself up from the desk. Our eyes were on the same level. I suddenly began to move toward her, some small wish in me suddenly swimming hard, leaping and plunging upstream into her look. But there was no real force in the rest of me; I was just weakly staggering. She put her arms out. I took another dizzy step, my eyes blindly on hers. She caught me by the shoulders and held me at arms’ length.

  Then I realized she was looking at me with pleasure—a mild, completely controlled pleasure.

  She said, “You really are so sweet. What am I going to do with you? Believe me, if I were a girl your age I really don’t know what—” She squeezed my shoulders, picked up her pocketbook, and left. I don’t believe she knew exactly what she was doing, but she had done it neatly. When she left I didn’t have any feeling left at all, not one bit.

  When I told Honorée this story I left out that last part—I think I thought she wouldn’t understand. But I was prepared for her to be stabbed by the poignancy. Instead she was filled with admiration for cousin Josie. Miss Hogentogler chose to regard my adolescent anguish as an anecdotal frame for the portrait of an elegant lady. And yet it was Miss Hogentogler who was by far my best student in our section of composition and rhetoric.

  I found that I looked forward to correcting my students’ papers. I divided the themes by sex and saved the girls’ for last. It was the most erotic experience of the week. When I would write a comment in the margin—“You can do better than this, Miss Akerblad”—the very act of adding the name would arouse me as though I had surreptitiously touched her. And the thought of her writing out corrections at my command made it seem as though she were shyly acquiescing. I would pore over the paper again and feverishly write out, at elaborate length, alternate ways for her to correct the dangling modifier, comma splice, or missing antecedent.

  Among the choices of titles that the department assigned for the first freshman theme was “My Life Story.”

  “My name is Honorée Hogentogler,” she wrote. “Honorée means honored in French. However my family name is of German racial origin. My sister’s name is Desirée. That means desired in French also. The other names in our family are normal. However our dog is named Kartoffel. This means potato in the German language. He is called that because of his supposed predilection for such a vegetable.” And so it went to the end, listing the events and honors of her life in stiff, nervous sentences. Wapsi Valley High girls’ gymnastics team. Choral group. Bell lyre in the marching band. Valedictorian. In short, whole-apple goodness. What interested me more was that when I said to her, “Instead of ‘because of his supposed predilection for such a vegetable,’ why don’t you say ‘because he likes potatoes’?” she replied, “I was being funny.”

  I knew she was not telling the truth. This slight taint attracted me.

  At this point I discovered why some of my colleagues didn’t like me. It was the way I dressed. The very style that so pleased Miss Hogentogler offended them. My officemate wore cowboy clothes. It was he who told me that several people had mentioned that they thought I was deliberately dressing up to put them down. Although they wore cowboy clothes, some of them came from back East, though not Miss Hogentogler’s East. One of them came from Fitchburg, Massachusetts. But even he had surely encountered a coat and tie at some time.

  They wished their students to call them by their first names, and this wish was somehow connected to their cowboy clothes—their theory being that their manner would help bridge the gap between their own rigorous intellects and those of their students, and at the same time align them with their students in a comforting way against the difficult fopperies of, say, Jane Austen. Insofar as they applied this theory to themselves, it was fine with me. But as they extended it to me, I became an illustration of conspicuous consumption—somehow a striped shirt with a white collar was a finger in the eye of democracy. My reaction to my officemate’s advice was to get my three-piece suit out of mothballs. The vest had small notched lapels; the tweed itself was green with squares drawn in bright orange lines—a borderline case between a country squire going bird shooting and a Newmarket tout. My officemate unfortunately was sick the next day, but this suit had a strong effect on Miss Hogentogler. The day after I wore it she told me she’d dreamed of it. In her dream it, and she and I, went to Europe together.

  “What was funny,” she said, “was that we went by train. Of course, maybe the train got put on a boat. Did you ever go by boat?”

  I said, “Only once by ship. Otherwise by plane.”

  She said, “Well, in my dream it couldn’t have been by plane. I’m terrified of planes. I’ve had dreams of planes crashing. I’m in my room at home—it’s on the top floor and there are all these planes flying around. Then one of them begins to fall right toward the house, right toward my room, and then it comes right through the ceiling right on top of me.”

  I said, “This plane isn’t firing a gun from its nose, is it?”

  “No,” she said. “It’s just an ordinary plane.”

  “Miss Hogentogler, have you ever read any Freud?”

  She said, “I don’t think so.”

  I said, “Have you ever slept with anyone?”

  She laughed and looked out the window. Then she looked at my face, her gaze focusing on one of my eyes and then the other. Which eye had the right answer?

  “Almost,” she said.

  “Almost?”

  “It was really very funny,” she said. “It was really just very amusing.”

  I told her about Freud. It occurred to me as I spoke that I had initially acquired Freud through oral tradition too. But Miss Hogentogler believed every word I said.

  Public speaking was part of rhetoric and composition. One of the assigned topics from English HQ was “My Favorite Magazine.”

  Honorée, when her turn came, said, “This assignment is one that finally awakened my interest. I at last have a speech topic that is nearly as interesting as ‘My Summer Job.’ My favorite magazine is of course Hot Rod.” She held it up daintily between her thumb and forefinger. She’d painted her short nails bright pink for the occasion. “I love to get up at the crack of dawn and get right to work on Hot Rod’s latest idea—how to put a full race cam on your family station wagon. Hot Rod is full of brilliant writing which evokes all my favorite smells—be they burning rubber from laying a strip or hot exhaust from the muffler by-pass. Although I have to say the prose is not as good as my favorite book, which is the repair manual for a f
ifty-two Ford.”

  Her irony grew heavier, and the class began to laugh.

  My own thoughts were suddenly possessive: Why was she playing to the boys? Miss Quist and Miss O’Rourke weren’t laughing. Did she want these boys to like her, after all? Moreover, she was making them laugh in a way that made me the butt—as though I were responsible for the speech topics, as though this class were capable of anything more. I looked down at Honorée’s speech-grading blank. Section 4 was Eye Contact. I circled Poor, then changed it to Fair. I thought she’d better keep in mind to whom she should address herself. But I rated the speech excellent as a whole. In all the other blanks except Voice I circled Excellent. I looked up and saw Honorée smiling at me tentatively, her face now oddly pale after the flush of victory at her first laugh. I wrote in the margin, “You have a beautiful voice, Miss Hogentogler,” and as though I were alone in my office, I felt the erotic power of marginal comment.

  The next speaker gave me his grading blank and went to the lectern. He was a tall conscientious boy with a blond crew cut that looked as though it had been stuck in quill by quill at the peak of the long flat slope of his forehead. He stood in silence for a moment. I said, “Go right ahead.”

  He said, “My favorite magazine is Hot Rod.”

  Laughter. Honorée flushed with triumph again.

  I said, “That’s all right. I’m sure Miss Hogentogler has left room for some genuine appreciation of the subject.” Honorée beamed at me across the room.

  Honorée said to me that since she knew my thesis topic was Elizabethan drama, she would like to ask me some questions about drama. I said fine. She said, “Do you think I could be an actress?”

  I said, “Not on the Elizabethan stage.”

  She looked puzzled.

  I said, “The girls’ parts were played by boys.”

  She said, “Oh, Mr. Hendricks. Don’t be droll.”

  I said, “Why this sudden interest?”

  “It’s not sudden. I had the female lead in our high school play. I played Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady.”