Straight Man

it till then, okay? You know where I live?”
    He nods. “Your ma give me directions.”
    I leave some money on the table for our breakfasts.
    “Your pa says he read every one of them books out there,” Mr. Purty says, and he considers this for a moment. “But I don’t believe him.”
    “How come, Mr. Purty?”
    “Because it ain’t possible,” he says. “There’s too many of them.”
    “You calling my father a liar, Mr. Purty?” I grin at him.
    “I guess I am, Henry,” he admits, grinning back at me.
    At the trough at the men’s room of The Circle Bar and Grill I try to imagine William Henry Devereaux, Sr.—a man whose greatest gift in life had always been his ability to see to his own needs—in the condition Mr. Purty just described. Having swilled larger than recommended dosages of NyQuil all weekend, I feel detached. My head cold symptoms have vanished, but so has my equilibrium. The graffiti on the men’s room wall swims before my eyes like my father’s lecture notes. I am dazed, unable to comprehend the simple messages that previous pilgrims to this spot have left for me on the wall. “Eat shit,” I am advised.
    The William Henry Devereaux, Sr., of my adolescence would see nothing amusing in such witless vulgarity. Is that why these two words strike me, at this moment, as the funniest in the English language? And who knows? This new William Henry Devereaux, Sr., the one Mr. Purty has just described to me, might find them funny too. Maybe he’d laugh like a lunatic. Then again, it could be they’d strike him as infinitely sad, so damn sad the tears would streak his old, spotted, hollowed-out cheeks, making him unrecognizable to himself.

CHAPTER
23
    From the faculty parking lot I can see that the TV van is again parked in one of the VIP spaces close to the pond, and once again protesters have gathered. In fact, it looks like there are twice as many of them. Not nearly as many people as used to protest the Vietnam War, but then again these people are protesting
me
. They are protesting the demise of a single goose. Still, they are chanting loud enough that I can hear them in the car with the windows rolled up.
    April, I remember from my own days as a sign carrier, is the best month for high moral dudgeon. Spring break is already over, so there’s no danger of having to interrupt the protest. The warming weather makes it seem right and natural to be outdoors. With finals a mere two weeks away, a good moral protest offers the requisite rationale for forsaking the dorm, the classroom, the library stacks. Lily and I courted through a series of protests—more worthy ones, I can’t help thinking—and I still remember the way my wife looked carrying a sign. Fierce. Beautiful. Strong. Good. I wonder if there’s some young woman likeher in this gaggle of protesters, disturbing the moral focus of some young Hal with a sign.
    From where I sit in the faculty lot, I can see that in the distance several large steel girders have sprung from the ground over the weekend, the framework of Technical Careers. I’m reminded of my dream last week, the one of my suddenly Brobdingnagian house. That dream makes a different kind of sense to me this morning, my head still full of NyQuil cobwebs, a jailed Angelo, a weeping William Henry Devereaux, Sr., and a separated Julie and Russell. I guess I’ve been sitting there awhile when someone raps on my driver’s side door, causing me to jump about a foot. I see it’s Meg Quigley and that she’s mightily pleased to have caused me to jump. When I roll down my window, she says, “Are you going to sit there all morning?”
    “You have a better plan?”
    When she just grins at me, I roll up my window and get out, ashamed to have been caught in a reverie, something that seems to happen to me more and more. I check my watch, try to gauge how long I’ve been there, how much time has elapsed during this particular ellipsis. “You’re not afraid to be seen with me?” I say when she falls into step with me on the way to Modern Languages.
    “I’m seen with dubious characters all the time,” she informs me. “They should all be so harmless.”
    I’m not sure I like the idea of being thought harmless by a young woman as beautiful as Meg Quigley, but I let it go. “I hear you’re off to graduate school again next year.”
    “That’s the plan,” she admits. “My father’s, not mine.”
    “You could do worse,” I hear myself say, taking Billy’s part. Is