Straight Man

going.
    I indulge this pleasant fantasy for a few minutes and then browse Dickie’s tall bookshelves for further diversion. Actually, I’ve heard a story about these books from Jacob Rose, though I discounted it at the time. Few men tell a better story than Jacob, but then, too, few have less regard for the truth. Jacob isn’t particularly malicious, at least by the rather liberal standards of academe, but he loves to embellish and is willing to do almost anything to improve a tale in the telling.
    As Jacob tells this particular story, during the early summer of his hiring, Dickie Pope arrived in Railton with a large moving van crammed with everything but books. Apparently these built-in bookcases in the CEO’s office can accommodate about a thousand, and the fact that he didn’t have any caused Dickie some slight embarrassment. He sensed that it wouldn’t be a good idea to fill the shelves with family photos and ceramic knickknacks. It occurred to him that Gracie DuBois might be of service, perhaps because she’d been utterly obsequious (“If there’s anything y’all need … anything a-tall …”) to both Dickie and his pale wife. And so Dickie commissioned her to find him some books at local auctions and the secondhand bookstores in State College and make sure they were all delivered to his office sometime in August, before the fall semester started. Which they were, late one afternoon, a physical plant minivan backing up to a rear entrance of the Administration Building, where two custodians off-loaded fifty boxes of books onto hand trucks, scooting them inside as quickly as possible, like a shipment of stolen VCRs. By the time the semester began, Dickie’s office was book-lined, floor to ceiling, as befitted the chief executive officer of an institution of higher learning. Even better, Jacob always concluded, unlike the books in Gatsby’s library, the pages of Dickie’s books had been not only cut but read, their margins full of sophomoric scribbling in a thousand undergraduate hands.
    I’ve not given much credence to this story until now. But in fact there seems to be no common denominator, no single intelligence that emerges from an examination of the books on these shelves, which seem not to have been organized, except perhaps by size and color. There are two copies of some books, including one by my father, which I take down and examine. It’s his first book of criticism, the one that put him on the map, the only really good one, according to my mother, who served as reader, sounding board, and editor, largely unrecognized,except in the fine print of the acknowledgments page, which lists her name among his other debts—to the university that awarded him release time to do the research, the Guggenheim Foundation, which funded its writing, and the writers’ colony that gave him (and not my mother) living space for a month one summer.
    In truth, the William Henry Devereaux, Sr., of the author photo doesn’t look like the type of fellow who’d require a lot of assistance, and that may be one of my father’s great gifts—his ability to suggest through a pose, a gesture, that he was himself all he needed. This appearance of self-sufficiency may even have been responsible for his success with young women in the various graduate programs in which he taught. Without being a strikingly handsome man, I suspect he managed to convey to them that whether they did or they didn’t was a matter of more concern to them than to him, and so of course they did. I understood why, having courted him too. This same self-sufficiency tormented me as a boy. If he was going somewhere, he made it clear that I could go along or not, as I chose, so I always chose to be near him, rather than my mother, whose company I preferred, because she paid attention to me. The fact that she seemed actually to like having me around, however, made her a less desirable companion when I had a choice between her and my father. I don’t recall how old I was before it dawned on me that my efforts to be close to my father were pointless for the simple reason that there
was
no getting close to him, not really. I probably would have come to this simple understanding sooner were it not for my mother, who hadn’t, I began to suspect, arrived at it herself.
    When I set William Henry Devereaux, Sr., down on the coffee table, another volume, farther down the shelf, attracts my attention. Its dust jacket—indeed the entire volume—is in