Straight Man

but he was undeterred. I saw them together on campus once or twice after that, and Bobo was holding her hand tenderly and stroking the blue veins in her pale wrist that I had myself often admired. I don’t get to count Leo among my advisees, but I got a letter from him a few weeks after the end of the term. He decided to take Hem’s advice and go it alone. Well, not completely alone. His letter was accompanied by the first hundred pages of a new novel he’d written since moving into a cabin in the mountains. It appears to be the story of a young novelist who moves into the mountains after a disastrous semester at the university, where no one, not even his writing teacher, understood how revolutionary his writing was.
    Also, Jacob Rose went into his files, resurrected a grant proposal Lily and I had written up nearly a decade ago, and without our permission pitched it to the chancellor. The idea had been that we’d track bright, disadvantaged high school kids in and around Railton, starting in their sophomore year, and guarantee them tuition and books at the Railton Campus for as long as they kept their grades up. Now that Lily’s been promoted to principal at the high school, the proposal makes even more sense, we’re told. Rourke got wind of the whole deal, including the fact that during the pilot program I’d be teaching part-time (number of classes to be negotiated) at the campus, part-time at the high school (ditto), and promptly labeled it a typical Devereaux boondoggle, but he didn’t seem interested in opposing it.
    Better still, Wendy, Rachel’s agent, formerly and now again
my
agent, parlayed my fifteen minutes of media fame into a book sale. Later this fall my “Soul of the University”
Rear View
satires will be collected and issued by a trade publisher, which will offer them to an unsuspecting public under the title
The Goose Slayer
. The cover will be a still of me brandishing Finny (the goose, not the man) aloft for the television cameras, and I will provide a foreword explaining the event, as well as a personal essay on William Henry Devereaux, Sr., part of which I’ve already written and which Wendy claims is the best work she’s ever seen from me. It’s the only piece that isn’t a satire, the onlypiece that doesn’t contain, as far as I can tell, a single yuk, though I’m convinced it belongs in the collection. There can be little doubt that William Henry Devereaux, Sr., his life and works, embody the spirit of our increasingly demoralized profession. Which brings me to—
    5. I am, as the last surviving William Henry Devereaux, my own man at last, though I must confess that my father’s death in mid-July affected me more powerfully than I dreamed it would. William Henry Devereaux, Sr., died quietly and painlessly, sitting upright in his favorite reading chair, dressed as if for a faculty meeting in a tweed jacket, corduroy slacks, and button-down oxford shirt, reading
Our Mutual Friend
, his chin resting on his chest. My mother thought he was napping and went about her own business quietly, not wanting to disturb him. That was no longer possible, if indeed it ever had been.
    We had little enough to say to each other, my father and I, before he died. His confidence to me on the day we visited the old midway—that he feared he might have once wronged Dickens—was as close to intimacy as we ever got, and I doubt we’d have improved upon that moment had he lived longer. That afternoon I came to understand that one of the deepest purposes of intellectual sophistication is to provide distance between us and our most disturbing personal truths and gnawing fears. The William Henry Devereaux, Sr., who returned to Railton with my mother and Mr. Purty still had access to the full range of human emotions, but after a lifetime of sophisticated manipulation they were no longer connected to anything real. They fired randomly, unexpectedly, like the passions of a newborn, urgent but without context or, in my father’s case, appropriate context.
    I suspect that my mother suffers from a similar affliction, though in a minor key, because my father’s death, so soon after his return, did not shake her as I would have predicted. At some level she must have felt not only cheated but also the butt of some cosmic joke. However, instead of being devastated by losing him all over again, she seemed almost released from some weighty obligation by his passing. As if, having said before family and friends