Straight Man

page before him. Abandoning his lecture notes, he returned to the roster of his students’ names. There, moments before, the letters had made sense, but now these too were scrambled. He knew that the last name in the column was the name of Miss Wainwright, and with difficulty he located the bottom of the column. Did these letters spell
Wainwright?
How were you supposed to tell? He looked up and located Miss Wainwright without difficulty. He studied her nose first, then an ear. This last thing—this ear—was it too a letter of the alphabet? He couldn’t remember. If you put it together witha nose, did it make a word? Did it spell
Wainwright?
Couldn’t be. In that case every student in the class would be named Wainwright. It was all too much. He felt his knees buckle, and he had to be helped from the lectern to an empty chair next to Miss Wainwright. He couldn’t stop looking at her nose. “Wainwright,” he cooed at it
.
    After this second occurrence, his affliction was no joke. My father wrote out all his lectures in advance and came to class prepared to deliver them, but once he’d read the roll, the same thing happened, and when it did he turned the lectern over to his research assistant, who then read the lecture while my father waited in the hall, sick with fear and humiliation. Out there by the door he could hear the manner in which the lecture was read, the vacillating timbre and skewed emphasis of the words as they came out of his assistant’s throat, and he understood more poignantly than ever before the difference between delivering information and teaching. Worse, separated from his authoritative personality, his observations—even the ones he was most proud of—seemed not … terribly profound
.
    This circumstance could not go on, and he knew it. He’d have to resign. He’d have to explain the whole humiliating mess to the dean. The worst part of it was that he’d be able to. He had no trouble talking to deans. It was students he couldn’t talk to
.
    This continued through the rest of September and most of October, until one day my father made a discovery that astonished him. Entering the classroom from the hallway, he started talking. Actually, he started
in
the hallway, where things always made sense. He began his sentence out there with his hand on the doorknob, then just continued as he entered. The class was on Dickens, a writer my father particularly despised for his sentimentality and lack of dramatic subtlety, and never did a scholar lay more complete waste to a dead writer than my father to Charles Dickens that day. Never was intellectual contempt more coolly disguised behind a thin veneer of urbane wit than that afternoon. As he talked, my father gained confidence from his own strong voice. He had given the same lecture before, but never like this. In a fit of unplanned dramatic ecstasy, he read Jo’s death scene from
Bleak House
to such devastating comic effect that by the time he’d finished the entire class was on the floor. Then they got up off the floor and gave him a standing ovation
. This
was what they’d paid their money for. Finally, they felt themselves to be in the presence of greatness, as they slammed
Bleak House
shut with contempt
.
    News that my father had at last spoken in the classroom and received a standing ovation swept through the department, whose patience with him, truth be told, was beginning to wear a little thin. They’d hired what they imagined to be a cleanup hitter, only to discover that he lacked even the warning-track power of all their other hitters. Why hadn’t somebody demanded a physical? It was one thing to be an uninspiring teacher, even a downright piss poor teacher, but you couldn’t be a mute, even if you were William Henry Devereaux, Sr
.
    A few members of the department were secretly disappointed to learn that their distinguished colleague had hit the long ball at last, and envious too, because the Dickens lecture was being discussed everywhere, as if it were the only one that mattered, as if no one else had given an important lecture at Columbia in the last decade. And they were disappointed as well that they would no longer be able to raise a skeptical eyebrow at each other when my father appeared in the office to gather his mail. (My father required two large boxes to accommodate the volume of correspondence he received from readers and other scholars seeking his advice.) You could tell just by observing my father’s stride