Straight Man

their cause.”
    “You play him like a violin.”
    “Nonsense,” my mother says. “We had a very pleasant weekend in New York. We ate in restaurants of Charles’s choosing. Even a truck stop on the way home. You should have seen your father trying to eat barbecued ribs, if you want to feel sorry for somebody.”
    “I do feel sorry for him,” I assure her.
    “He needs a new denture, and it’s one of the first things we’re going to attend to as soon as we’re ensconced.”
    Marge can’t seem to find the right key to the inner door, which delay affords my mother the opportunity to observe me more closely. “Your eyes are all puffy. Have you been weeping?” She reaches up to touch my right eye.
    I deflect her index finger. “Don’t be asinine. And speaking of weeping, what’s this I hear about Dad bursting into tears?”
    “I’ll wait inside,” Marge volunteers, feeling, no doubt, peripheral to this strange conversation.
    When she’s found the key and gone in, my mother says, in a voice intended to convey confidentiality without being actually confidential, “Your father is not in the best shape. That last woman—the Virginia Woolf one—really did a number on him.”
    My mother identifies all the women my father has aligned himself with according to their academic specialties. The young woman he left her for was in his D. H. Lawrence seminar, and since then he’s taken up with a Brontë woman and a Joseph Conrad woman, before finally coming a cropper with Virginia Woolf.
    “I’m convinced she was responsible for his collapse. Did you know she cleaned out both his checking and savings before abandoning him? Your father is a virtual pauper.”
    She pauses to let me contemplate a world in which such a thing can happen.
    “And I don’t care what they say at the hospital. He’s not over it. Not that it would do him the slightest good to remain there. What he needs is normalcy. He needs familiar surroundings. He needs his books and someone to talk to about the things that matter to him. It’s a shame he can’t resume teaching until the fall, but the timing can’t be helped.”
    I blink at her. “Teach where?” I ask before I think.
    “Right here, of course,” my mother explains, as if to a child. “One course per semester is not too much to expect, I think. Who’s that little man with the ridiculous name who runs everything?”
    “Dickie Pope?”
    “I’ve an appointment to discuss the matter with him next week.”
    “I wouldn’t mention my name.”
    “There shouldn’t be any need,” she assures me. “Your father’s own name carries considerable weight, as you know. And the chancellor isan old friend. He’s promised to instruct the little papal fellow to give your father the one course. They’re fortunate to have a man of your father’s stature. He’ll have to have a designation, of course, but all that can be worked out later.”
    On this note we move from the foyer into the house, where the excellent Marge awaits us.
    “Ah, well, yes,” my mother says when we enter the formal dining room through two French doors. The room is lined with bookcases, floor to ceiling, and what she imagines, I suspect, is the room full not only of books but of people—the best graduate students (of which there are none on our campus), the occasional visiting poet or other dignitary (for which there is no budget), an adoring English department faculty to hang on my father’s ideas (Finny?). What she’s looking at is her own faith, and the smile that blossoms on her old face is pure vindication.
    “Mother,” I can’t help but say, “you take my breath away.”
    At the rear gate to the university I encounter three idling Railton police cars, as well as a campus security vehicle. My first irrational thought is that they’re waiting there to prevent my entrance, but apparently they have other business, because after I turn in, the lead car pulls out into traffic and the other three follow. In the last of these, a young woman occupies the rear seat reserved for miscreants, and as the two vehicles pass I catch a quick glimpse of her face, which is familiar, though I can’t place it. Was she among the throng of animal rights protesters this morning? Even more bizarre, that split second in which I register the young woman’s features, she seems to take me in as well, perhaps even to recognize me. Do I imagine it, or does her head turn to follow me?
    I park in the far lot behind Modern