Straight Man

think, more receptive to doubts and fears (and perhaps even guilt) in the dark than we are in the light of day. I don’t think my father cared for these sensations. When I was a boy, of course, I had no way of knowing thatthe man I found clean shaven and cologned in the book-lined den of the big, old house my parents rented a few blocks from the university might be subject to doubt or fear or guilt. A child’s life is full of these, and I may even have concluded that adulthood represented triumph over them. There were probably mornings when I found him there in his reading chair, sweet-smelling and intent upon the printed page, that he was fresh from some illicit encounter with a young female graduate student mere hours before. Apparently he’d had a number of relationships with young women before he settled on the one in his D. H. Lawrence seminar that he preferred to my mother. I’m sure I took his early rising as a sign of virtue, and probably even understood my mother’s remaining in bed, her eyes defiantly clenched against the new day, as a character defect, especially given the mood she was in when she finally came downstairs around midmorning and peered in at my father and me with an expression that verged upon menace.
    It was my habit on Saturday and Sunday mornings to stretch out on the floor at my father’s feet and pore over the encyclopedia. I knew not to interrupt my father’s reading, risk one of his monumental scowls, so by the time my mother appeared, I was usually starved. “When’s breakfast?” was always my first question to my bathrobed mother, whose already threatening expression always darkened dangerously. I suspect it was those weekend mornings that first led my mother to conclude that I was my father’s son, a conviction she still adheres to. My “when’s breakfast?” by way of hello must have unhinged her, knowing as she did that I’d just spent two or three hours quietly in my father’s company without asking for so much as a glass of water. Who could blame her for not sharing my father’s deep appreciation of the new day?
    Lily is also a morning person, and I often overheard her tell our daughters, when they were growing up and full of adolescent self-doubt, that things would look different in the morning, and of course this is wise counsel. Not only do things look different in the morning, they look better, which is not, of course, the same as to say that they
are
better. Still, if things look more manageable in the sunlight, we are wise, like my father, to greet the new day early, and I suspect now that there were very few moonlit indiscretions he was not able to banish from his thoughts at six in the morning with the aid of a virtuous bookof literary criticism and his own sweet child stretched out at his feet, soaking up Britannica by osmosis.
    I am neither a morning person nor, I maintain, my father’s son. After a night of misbehavior I cannot tell when my alarm clock is about to go off. I often don’t immediately recognize the sound of the alarm even
after
it’s gone off. Neither tea nor literary criticism banishes guilty memory in William Henry Devereaux, Jr., who has dreamed, powerfully and variously, all this night long. Only when the ringing continues after I switch off the alarm do I realize it’s the telephone I’m hearing. By the time I pick up, the line’s dead.
    It occurs to me that Lily has been trying to call. She probably tried to reach me last night until it got too late, and now she’s begun again. Missing me now may even have convinced her that I didn’t come home at all last night, that her prediction has already come true. I’m either in the hospital or in jail.
    I wish she’d call back now, because I’d like to share with her the last of my dreams, in which the new College of Technical Careers building has turned out to be yet another replica of my own house, like Julie’s, this one on a Brobdingnagian scale. It’s the size of the Modern Languages Building, which houses the English department, but it’s my house, Lily’s and mine, monstrously swollen. Same number of rooms, same floor plan, except built for giants. Inside it, I am a little dollhouse person. To go upstairs I have to stand on a chair, hoist myself up the step, pull the chair up behind me with a rope, then repeat the process. The reason I’m mountain-climbing my way upstairs is that Lily has been calling down to me. She wants to explain to me why she thinks I’m so