Straight Man

that William Henry Devereaux, Sr., was back. After the Dickens lecture he looked like a new man. He looked like a man who’d just gotten laid by twins
.
    His altered appearance notwithstanding, my father was not convinced his trials were over, and the next class after the famous
Bleak House
lecture proved they weren’t. Halfway through the roll call he felt the now familiar creeping dread coming on, and so he excused himself in the middle of the
M’
s, went outside into the hall, and spoke the first few words of his lecture out there, reentering when he had made his beginning. Today’s lecture was on
David Copperfield.
Out in the hall, his hand on the knob, my father said, “Dickens didn’t care, you see …,” and then he turned the knob and reentered the classroom. “… about the working conditions of the poor. David Copperfield doesn’t object to children working in dark, squalid, unhealthy factories. What seems wrong to David is that such a situation should befall himself, a bright, sensitive child. Dickens’s hero was no crusader after social justice, and neither was his creator, though he didn’t object when he was confused with such crusaders.” And he was off. My father focused on a point midway up the tall seminar-room windows, considerably above the heads of even his tallest students, trusting that, from where they were sitting, he would appear tobe looking not so much “up” as “back,” into nineteenth-century London. From the depths of the blacking factory where David Copperfield was employed, my father could hardly be expected to notice a twentieth-century hand raised in question or objection
.
    As my father talked, he was full of inner marveling that the remedy to his affliction should be so simple, that it could have evaded him for so long. All he needed to do was not take roll or stare directly at the expectant faces of his students. Miss Wainwright had dropped the class the same day he cooed at her nose, and he felt bad about that, but he was back and functioning, and that was the important thing. William Henry Devereaux, Sr., was back
.
    There
.
    I hope the above will satisfy my readers’ curiosity about the doings of William Henry Devereaux, Sr., subsequent to the events of my last column. It is, I’m sure everyone will agree, a happier story than the last, which had a dead dog in it and which caused more than one reader of this newspaper to stop and consider the whole issue of mortality, never a pleasant thing to do. The above tale is more optimistic in every way, and I hope readers of this column will take heart from the understanding that even complex problems like the one faced by my father often have simple solutions if we keep our minds open. An open mind, I need not remind readers, is the key to a successful university life, and may even have indirect applications to those living and working outside the Academy
.

CHAPTER
21
    When the telephone rings early Monday morning, I decide to let Julie answer it. She’s been on the phone all weekend, so it’s probably for her. I’ve not wanted to listen in on her conversations, so I don’t really know who she’s been talking to or what she’s been saying. But I’m pretty sure she hasn’t made any of the phone calls she
should
make. She hasn’t called a realtor, for instance, to put their house on the market. And I don’t think she’s talked to Russell, though in fairness that may be because she doesn’t know where he is. What she seems to have done is talk
about
Russell, to everyone she knows. “It’s called a support system, Daddy,” she explained yesterday afternoon. “When bad things happen, it’s not smart to try to be the Lone Ranger.”
    “Well, sure,” I concede. “A Tonto or two, but …”
    But my daughter belongs to a talk show generation that seems to be losing the ability to discriminate between public and private woes. She sees no reason she shouldn’t tell her friends about her marriage, even encourage them to take sides, pass judgment. It’s not even theknee-jerk confession mode that worries me most. It’s my daughter’s fear of silence and solitude that seems unnatural. If she weren’t talking to her friends, she might be listening to other voices in her own head, voices she might benefit from hearing out. Instead, she telephones. When she runs out of people to call, she opts for electronic company, the television in one room, the stereo in the next. She may even consider these part of