Straight Man

bed, watching television and dozing and trying to draft on my laptop computer a short piece for the
Railton Mirror
about my father at Columbia, and discovering as I did so that a strict diet of broth, cold remedies, and nasal spray is not especially conducive to good prose. This morning, I don’t feel too bad, considering. If the phone would just stop ringing, I’d be fine.
    “Don’t hang up,” Teddy pleads.
    “Okay,” I agree easily. It’s a promise I won’t mind breaking if I need to.
    “Somebody killed a goose and hung it from a tree branch on campus. Lou Steinmetz thinks it was you.”
    “How would you know what Lou Steinmetz thinks? How can you be sure
that
he thinks?”
    “You know Randy over in security? He was the one on the desk. He called Lou, and the first words out of Lou’s mouth were, ‘I bet it was that beatnik English professor.’ ”
    “Beatnik?” I say, though I recognize Lou from his word choice.
    “You want me to come over?” Teddy offers.
    “Why?”
    “We could drive in to campus together?”
    “Why?”
    Silence. No doubt he’s still miffed by my refusing to engage in his proposed council of war yesterday afternoon after I promised I would. “Okay. Just tell me. I won’t breathe a word. Even to June. Did you do it?”
    I’m pretty tempted to tell him I did. I can tell how badly he wants to believe it. “I’m not saying another word until I speak to my lawyer.”
    “This could be just the thing you need today,” Teddy says. I search for sarcasm in these words, but I don’t find any. “This could put everybody back on your side in the department meeting.”
    “What department meeting?” I say, and hang up.
    I put on coffee, then shave, shower, and get dressed. I pour myself a cup of coffee and am about to knock on the guest room door and tell Julie I have to go in to school when I hear a car drive up outside and see that it’s my daughter. She comes in carrying a cardboard box, which she sets down in the middle of the island.
    “He’s been there,” she says, a variation on the more traditional ‘good morning.’ ”
    She takes her sunglasses off, slings them onto the counter, and turns to face me. Her eye doesn’t look as bad today. The swelling has gone down, the purple and blue metamorphosed into less angry looking yellow-green. Julie herself, on the other hand, is no less angry. “He picked up some clothes and some of his other stuff. He showered, too.” This last seems to have particularly galled her.
    “Did he use the toilet?”
    She ignores this question and the man who spoke it. “Today the locks get changed.” Though her eye looks better, the tuck at the corner is heavy this morning, dragging the lid down.
    “Julie—” I begin.
    “And don’t try to talk me out of it.”
    “Okay,” I say, taking my coffee cup over to the sink and rinsing it out.
    “See?” she says when I turn around. “That’s a simple enough thing. I can never even get him to do that.”
    I’m lost. “Do what?”
    “Rinse out a damn coffee cup.”
    Actually, the way she’s glaring at me suggests that she’d trade the two of us, husband and father, for a one-legged Puerto Rican maid.
    At the foot of the hill I turn left instead of right and head out toward Allegheny Wells instead of Railton. I’m not anxious to get in to campus. If indeed a goose has been killed, there’s no telling what manner of shit awaits me. Admittedly, the idea of being interrogated by Lou Steinmetz is appealing. Under normal circumstances the William Henry Devereaux, Jr., who is accused of cleverness by his mother might enjoy twisting Lou Steinmetz into rhetorical knots, but today Lucky Hank’s heart is not in the enterprise. In fact, he’s reminded as hedrives along the two-lane blacktop of a famous experiment performed on children to gauge—what?—their ambition? self-confidence? self-esteem? In the test each child is given a beanbag and shown a circle, then invited to toss the beanbag into the circle from behind a line, something even the clumsiest child finds easy to do. Next the child is moved back to a second line, so that the toss to the circle is farther and more difficult. After each toss the child is moved back a few feet, so that each toss becomes more difficult, failure more probable. Finally the child is given the beanbag and told he can have one more toss, from anywhere he chooses. A few kids opt for the most difficult toss, sensing, without being able to articulate