Nobody's Fool

cheaters, he said, and cheaters never prospered. This was the point he’d been trying to make one night at the dinner table, the subject of cheating having been raised by the publication of another Wynoski letter. He’d hoped Miss Beryl might champion this view.
    â€œCheaters
always
prosper, you mean,” his wife had corrected him before his voice had even dropped. Moreover, she continued, if Schuyler Springs was built on a foundation of gambling and sin, there was no reason to expect the edifice to crumble anytime soon. There was nothing in the least shaky about such foundations, she said. If anything was shaky, it was Gert Wynoski’s intellectual dexterity. Finally, there was no reason to wait for God to speak on the subject of Schuyler Springs. The evidence rather suggested he had already spoken, and it was Bath’s springs that had run dry.
    How, in such an atmosphere, Clive Sr. despaired, could you teach football, much less The Larger Context of Life? He would have liked to put his foot down, but every time he tried, Miss Beryl made short work of him. Had she been mean-spirited in demolishing the moral positions he’d staked out so carefully, he might have known how to proceed, but she was always so gentle and loving when she crushed his arguments that anger seemed unbecoming. But as his arguments were systematically ground to dust he became increasingly exasperated, as if civilization were crumbling as well, which at times he suspected it was. Miss Beryl, with Clive Sr.’s star athlete for an audience, seemed actually to be arguing that government, law, even God’s own church were not always worthy of respect. In Clive Sr.’s view, if these were seriously questioned, how long would it be before football coaches came under attack as well?
    Not that Miss Beryl had found a convert in Sully. In fact, the two argued all the time, and Miss Beryl gently chided Sully in much the same way she chided Clive Sr. Nor did Sully ever take Miss Beryl’s side in discussions that involved Clive Sr. In fact, Sully seemed unaware that there was a conflict, a tug-of-war for his attention. He seemed unaware of Clive Sr.’s mounting irritation at how his subjects kept getting derailed in favor of hers. He hadn’t invited Sully to their table to talk about poetry. He’d brought him there to talk about football. He’d hoped to convince Sully that football
was
poetry.
    Clive Jr. had watched his father’s frustration grow, and he waited until he sensed the right time. It came one night when Sully volunteered to help Miss Beryl with the dishes—imagine, Clive Sr.’s all-conference halfback/linebacker doing dishes—and Clive Sr., unable to watch, had retreated to the living room to listen to the radio, or pretend to. Clive Jr. had followed him in there and sat frowning in a chair across the room until their eyes met, and then Clive Jr. had spoken. “I liked it better,” he told his father, “when it was just us. When it was just our own family.” His father had started to say something, then stopped, his dark gaze finding the kitchen door and the sound of raised, argumentative, joyful voices. “And that’s the way it’s going to be again,” his father had said, his voice never more purposeful, even on the football field.
    After dinner the next evening, when Sully had left to go out somewhere with his friends, Clives Sr. and Jr. had taken a walk up Main in the direction of the Sans Souci. It was early November, but the weather had already turned bitter and the elms were bare overhead, a network of black branches, impossibly high and distant. At the corner of Main and Bowdon, they had turned left, as Clive Jr. had known they would. At the tiny Sullivan house, they had knocked and waited for a long time until Sully’s mother, dressed in a robe, had finally answered the door. She seemed to know why they’d come, though she’d waited patiently in their shabby living room for Clive Sr. to express his sympathy for the loss of their eldest son, to explain how proud he was of Donald (he used his wife’s nomenclature in this instance), how he was the backbone of the team, how the team was really a family in the larger context and how the season had only another week to go before that family split up. They’d enjoyed having Sully over at their house so much during the season, and he hoped Mrs. Sullivan hadn’t thought they