Straight Man

pristine condition, and when I turn it over to examine the back panel, a serious-looking young man stares up at me with an intense, Rasputin-like gaze, suggestive of intolerance, superiority, and high seriousness. Had I tried, I now wonder, to strike a pose like my father’s on the jacket of his own first book? I seem to recall imagining that by dressing in jeans and a collarless shirt, and by having the long hair of the times, I’d offer a striking contrast to my betweeded scholar father, but my posture and attitude now strike me as his, donned, unlike the clothes, without thought. The captionbelow the author photo reads, “Henry Devereaux at home in Railton, PA.” The photo itself seems calculated to suggest that such a man would never be at home in Railton, PA. On the title page I encounter an inscription in my own hand. “For Finny,” it says. “With affection and admiration. Good luck.”
    I require a minute to remember why I might have wished Finny luck (the admiration and affection I take to be license). Then I remember we’d both come up for tenure and promotion to associate professor the same year, and everyone knew that Finny stood no chance. In the six years he’d been at the Railton Campus, he hadn’t finished the dissertation begun at the University of Pennsylvania, and about the only thing in his file was a letter from his dissertation director which said that he hadn’t given up on Finny and he hoped we wouldn’t either. I, on the other hand, with an authored book to my credit, was thought to be a shoo-in, even though I had brashly put myself up for promotion after just a year in residence. Predictably, though no one predicted it, Finny got his promotion that year and I was turned down, a circumstance that had so enraged me that, with Jacob Rose’s help (he’d become chair the next year), I put myself up for full professor, an act of such unprecedented and unmitigated arrogance that the committee approved it, thus effectively rooting me to the scene of the crime, too weighed down by tenure, rank, and salary to be marketable ever again.
    My own errors in judgment I can forgive, but Finny, the rat, has sold my book, a book I now vividly remember giving him in what I considered at the time to be a sweet, parting gesture, since no man was ever less tenurable than Finny.
    Oddly, my outrage at Finny is the only emotion I feel holding the book.
The
book. Without exactly putting me on the map, as my father’s first book did him, this modest little volume of mine did a good deal, deciding, to some degree, the destiny of both its author and its author’s family. Its acceptance brought us to Railton, and its advance started knocking down those first trees out in Allegheny Wells and bought the adjacent two lots I’ve since refused to sell and thus given impetus to the various petty English department feuds that have served as our substitute for genuine conflict. Not this actual volume I’m holding in my hand, of course, which has had about as ignominious a life as can befalla book. It’s been owned first by a man who apparently wouldn’t have it as a gift and then by a man who views it as interior decoration. Like Oliver Twist, it’s gone from a bad home to a worse one. When I hear Dickie’s voice in the outer office, giving instructions to his secretary, I slip the volume into my coat pocket.
    When he comes in, we shake hands again, rather too vigorously for the occasion, it seems to me, though it’s true I’m not sure, now that I’m here, what the occasion is. Is this my regularly scheduled, state-of-the-department annual meeting with the campus administration, or is it the meeting I’ve been warned about, where I will be apprized of the impending purge? Or will both these agenda items be put aside in order to discuss my recent television appearance and the embarrassment I’ve caused those who pay my salary?
    Dickie Pope seldom wears a jacket and tie, and he’s not wearing these now. His blue oxford button-down shirt is rolled into an artful three-quarter sleeve. His gray slacks are a miracle of pleating, and his cordovan loafers look like he bought them on the way to the campus this morning. He’s a studied regular guy, this Dickie, and as diminutive as his name.
    Collapsing onto one end of the sofa along the wall facing the bookshelves, he indicates that I’m free to occupy the other. “Lawyers and cops. Cops and lawyers. And I thought I was going to be an educator,” he moans