Straight Man

dig the two of them out from under the rubble. But then I see a man seated on the steps of our deck, it appears, crying. I don’t immediately recognize him as Finny, because he’s dressed in simple slacks and a button-down shirt, not his usual white suit.
    My first thought is that Finny must be weeping over his own academic fate. Lily has told me this morning that according to
The Rear View
, the faculty, after learning that Dickie Pope had been canned and that Jacob Rose, a man they’d known and respected for years, would bethe new CEO, voted overwhelmingly not to strike, a decision that defeated the position urged by their own union, not to mention the interests of those faculty like Finny who would be directly affected by next year’s budget cuts. In this context I am not surprised to see Finny awaiting the return of his longtime adversary. No doubt he’s concluded, in the naive way of career academics, that a shifting wind will have caused a realignment, that we are now made allies by our shared reversal of fortune. But then I see there’s a white bundle, like a sack of dirty laundry, only flatter, at Finny’s feet. As we draw closer I see that it’s a white sheet, darkly spotted.
    “Anyhow,” Angelo is saying, “to make a long story short—”
    But I have already gotten out of the car and so has Lily. When we arrive at the bottom of the step, I lift up the sheet, though I already know what I will see.
    “I never saw him,” Finny says, struggling to his feet like a very old man, his eyes red, anguished, swollen. “He ran right in front of me.”
    God, as always, is in the details, and I see that Occam’s legs are crusted with mud, which means that he spent his night of freedom miles away at the lake, returning just in time to encounter Finny’s car.
    “I’d come to see Marie,” Finny explains, referring to his ex-wife, who still lives at the bottom of the hill. “She gave me the sheet.”
    I let the sheet fall back. Lily has turned away rather than look. Angelo takes her in his arms, and she lets him, and the sight of this has me right up there in the high ninetieth percentile, affection-wise, for this wonderful woman I have too long taken for granted, as Teddy warned me years ago I was doing.
    “You probably think I did it on purpose …,” Finny croaks.
    “Don’t be an ass,” I tell him. For in fact I have never been more convinced of the string of cause and effect, of the sequence and consequence that is destiny, than I am at this moment. It begins with a comic threat to kill a duck and ends here at my feet. Finny doesn’t know it, but he’s merely acting as the agent of Chance, the nameless footman of the drama. “Another man would have driven away.
I
might have driven away, Finny,” I feel compelled to add.
    Because the truth is, we never know for sure about ourselves. Who we’ll sleep with if given the opportunity, who we’ll betray in the right circumstance, whose faith and love we will reward with our own.Angelo has no more idea what his own story means than he knew what he would do until he did it. How was he to know that he would be visited by such a strange emotion in the very doorway to the home he had guarded for so long? How could he have predicted its consequence? When my poor mother came down into the cellar that afternoon and saw her son standing on a chair, how could she have had any idea that by drawing me to her so fiercely, by saving her son she set in motion our mutual estrangement, for how could we forget such a moment without distancing ourselves from each other, who shared its anguish? Only after we’ve done a thing do we know what we’ll do, and by then whatever we’ve done has already begun to sever itself from clear significance, at least for the doer.
    Which is why we have spouses and children and parents and colleagues and friends, because someone has to know us better than we know ourselves. We need them to tell us. We need them to say, “I know you, Al. You’re not the kind of man who.”

EPILOGUE
    For every complex problem there is a
simple solution. And it’s always wrong
.
    —H. L. Mencken
    By the third week of August I notice the leaves beginning to turn on the doomed side of the macadam in Allegheny Wells. Lily and I, without ever speaking of the matter, have taken to jogging in the early morning to avoid the worst of the summer’s heat. Sometimes we run toward Railton, other times out toward the village of Allegheny Wells, though we