Robert Parker - Love and Glory

“She seems fine to me,” I said.

“Oh, surely. She’s much better now that she’s out of the house and has something to occupy her mind. I’m afraid motherhood and housewifery were not what Jennifer was cut out for.”

“She’s doing well in class,” I said.

“Yes. She’s a conscientious student. Probably got some of that from me. When I was doing my book on Teasdale, I had her as what amounts to a research assistant and she learned a great deal about scholarship and research and the standards that scholarship sets.”

“Sara Teasdale?” I said.

“Yes. I did the biography of her for the Twayne series.”

“You a Teasdale specialist?” I said.

“Well, in a sense,” Merchent said. “I have become somewhat of a specialist because no one else has done the research. My critical study of her poetry will be out in the fall, and we’re negotiating for a casebook.”

“A Sara Teasdale casebook,” I said.

“Yes. I was really quite fortunate to find a whole area of literature like that in which little work had been done.”

“Did you do your dissertation on her?” I said. He taught the English eighteenth century.

“No, my dissertation was on Nahum Tate,” he said. “Let me offer you some advice, Boone. If you’re going to publish, it’s important to stake out fields of research that haven’t been overharvested.”

I nodded again.

“Have you developed a special interest yet?” Merchent asked.

“I sure have,” I said.

“American or English?”

“American,” I said.

He nodded approval. “It’s a field that needs some fresh scholarship,” he said. “Good seeing you, Adams, let’s get together soon, some Sunday afternoon to drink some beers and chat.”

“Sure,” I said. And Merchent smiled and went to get more sherry and strike up a conversation with the chairman. I looked around. Jennifer, holding a barely sipped plastic glass of sherry, was sitting on the arm of a sofa, listening intently to a young woman explain the problems associated with water fluoridation. The woman wore a white T-shirt and a loose blue denim jumper. She was sitting on the floor with her legs crossed under the skirt. Beside her a young man squatted on his heels. He had on a tan corduroy suit and a plaid flannel shirt with a black knit tie. His hair and beard were untended and long, and his eyeglasses were the kind that the army used to issue, neutral-colored plastic frames with round lenses. I didn’t know the girl. The guy squatting beside her was named Allan Raskin. He was writing his doctoral dissertation on Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

“It’s an intrusion of my right not to ingest fluoride,” the girl in the denim jumper was saying. Her dark hair was long and very curly. “The government has no business medicating me against my will.”

Allan Raskin nodded furiously. “Absolutely. There’s research that clearly shows fluoride to be poisonous.”

“That’s not the point,” the girl in denim said. “Even if it were perfectly safe, the government has no right to put it in my drinking water. That’s a fascist act.”

Raskin nodded again. He pointed at her with a shake of his hand. “You’re damned right, Trudy. That’s a very good point. Even if it’s harmless, it’s fascist.” He nodded again. And kept nodding as if he were following the train of implications even deeper within.

“Are you opposed to chloride too?” Jennifer said.

Trudy shook her head very hard. “No, I won’t be sidetracked,” she said. “That’s a red herring, Jennifer. It’s not to the issue. It’s exactly the kind of smoke screen they throw up to get our minds off the real issue, which is, and very clearly so, fascism.”

Jennifer saw me looking at her across the heads of the anti-fascists. She glanced quickly down at them, saw they weren’t looking at her, glanced back up at me, and crossed her eyes. I took a step closer and said, “Excuse me, Jennifer, I’d like to show you something over here if you could give me a minute.”

She nodded. “I’ll be back, Trudy,” she said, and stood up and walked with me to the other corner of the room.

“Thanks,” she said. “I have learned more about fascism and crypto-fascism and covert fascism than I ever really wanted to know.”

“How come people whose area of specialization and, you’d assume, interest, is literature spend all their time talking about politics?”

“They don’t,” Jennifer said. “Just the graduate students do that. The undergraduates talk about grades and the professors talk about tenure and promotion.”

“Gee,” I said. “It’s not nearly so platonic as I expected.”

“But it’s quite a lot of fun,” Jennifer said. “Try staying home for three years with a kid.”

“It’s not like your life has been without adventure though,” I said. “I understand you got to help your husband do his biography of Sara Teasdale.”

She looked at me carefully. I kept my face neutral. “One can do a first-rate study of a second-rate figure.”

“Sure,” I said.

“It’s a book, Boonie, and he’s got another coming out in the fall. What have you ever written?”

“Nothing much,” I said. “I’ve kept a kind of a journal. I’ll show it to you someday.”

Merchent owned a home on Marblehead Neck with a backyard which, broken by occasional granite outcroppings, sloped down to the water. It was a vast old house done in weathered shingles with a broad veranda all around it. It was furnished in the period when it had been built. There was a lot of Tiffany glass and Victorian furniture. In the front hall an umbrella stand had been made from an elephant’s foot. I sat in what Merchent called the back study, with a fire in the fireplace, on a bright October afternoon drinking the second of some beers and having a chat with Merchent and Jennifer and Merchent’s mother, Margaret, and, more than I cared to, with his daughter Sue Sue, who was five and a half.

“Of course in class, Boone, and elsewhere in a university context, I would hope you’d call me Dr. Merchent, or Professor Merchent.”

“Sure, John,” I said.

“You didn’t need to tell him that,” Jennifer said.

“Better safe than sorry,” Margaret said. She wasn’t drinking some beers. She was drinking scotch on the rocks and liking it. I could tell. I remembered the feeling, checking the bottle and having that comfortable sense of plenty when you saw it was still almost full. “I always used to tell John’s father that. No harm intended, no harm done.”

Sue Sue was sprawled on the floor drawing pictures on white paper and scattering them around under our feet. “Here’s one of you, Boone,” she said.

I looked at the circle with the smile and the round eyes. “Very nice,” I said. “May I keep it?”

She nodded and began drawing another one. I said to Merchent, “I was reading a piece by Katharine Balderston recently called ‘Johnson’s “Vile Melancholy.” ’ What do you think? Is it persuasive to a specialist?”

Merchent’s smooth face remained smooth. Then he frowned slightly. “Balderston,” he said. Then he shook his head. “I’m afraid I don’t know it.” He shook his head and smiled. “Departmental business. More and more it interferes with scholarship. Since I became graduate director it’s harder and harder to keep up.”

Margaret had another scotch on the rocks. “You work too hard as it is, dear,” she said.

“Well, the thrust of the thing is that Johnson’s melancholy was in fact masochistic. Balderston cites letters...”

“Here’s another picture of you, Boone,” Sue Sue said. It looked much like the other one. Since it was of the same subject I supposed it should. I nodded. “Nice,” I said. “Balderston examines letters...”

“Aren’t you going to keep it?” Sue Sue said.

“No, thank you,” I said. “I only have room on my wall for one. I live in a small apartment.”

Sue Sue crumpled up the drawing and stomped over to the fireplace and threw it into the flames. Then she made a big sigh and said to Jennifer, “I’m sick of drawing.”

“Want to watch TV?” Jennifer said.

“No.”

“Come sit on Mamie’s lap and draw,” Margaret said. “I’d love a picture of me.”

“I can’t draw on your lap,” Sue Sue said. “There’s no place for the paper.”

Merchent said, “Jennifer, why don’t you take her out for a while.”

Margaret said, “Oh, no. No. No. The poor thing. She wants to be with all the people. Doesn’t she, Sue Sue? She wants to visit with the company too.”

“Well,” Merchent said, “if you stay, Sue Sue, you have to let us talk, okay?”

“I can talk too,” she said.

“But not when someone else is talking,” Jennifer said.

Sue Sue got in her grandmother’s lap and put her face against her grandmother’s shoulder and said, “Nobody likes me.”

“Oh, sweetie,” Margaret said. She was on her third scotch and was beginning to slush her S’s. “Don’t be silly, everyone loves you.”

“When’s he going home?” Sue Sue said.

Jennifer said, “Suzanna!”

Margaret was patting Sue Sue on the back. “She’s just tired,” she said. “Are you tired, sweetie?”

Merchent sipped his beer from a tall tulip-shaped glass. “I’ll have to look into the Balderston article,” he said. “Did you happen to see the review of my Teasdale book in J.A.P.A.?”

Sue Sue was continuing to talk against her grandmother’s shoulder. “Nobody likes me,” she said. “Nobody likes me.” The repetition became a kind of chant.

“Mamie loves you,” Margaret said. She drank scotch with her free hand. “I’ll have just one more drink, dear,” she said to John. “Not too much, just one jigger.”

“Could you get that for my mother, Jennifer?” Merchent said. Jennifer put down her barely touched bourbon and water and got her mother-in-law’s glass and put more scotch in and ice. I noticed she didn’t use a jigger.

“You’re sure just one jigger, Jennifer?”

“Absolutely,” Jennifer said.

“Nobody likes me,” Sue Sue crooned. “Nobody likes me.”

I said, “I don’t recognize the Journal.”

“Journal of the American Poetry Association,” Merchent said. “Very reputable.”

Margaret was singing “Rock-a-bye baby, in the tree-top” and rocking Sue Sue back and forth. Sue Sue continued to chant “Nobodylikesme nobodylikesme.” Neither Sue Sue nor Margaret was very loud. But they were steady.

“Let me get it for you,” Merchent said. “It’s really a rather interesting piece.” He got up and went out of the room. I looked at Jennifer. Her face was bright, intelligent, charming, interested. Her eyes were blank.

“Rockabyenobodylikesmebabyinthenobodylikesmetree top.”

The fireplace was made of fieldstone and covered nearly the whole inner wall of the study. Two other walls had bookcases. The rear wall faced out onto the veranda and beyond it down the slope of lawn and rock and garden was the ocean, white-flecked and uneasy. The color of a slate roof.

“Nobodylikesmethecradlewillfallnobodylikesmedown willcomebabycradleandall.”

I could feel a small trickle of sweat run down my side from my right armpit. Merchent came back in with his copy of J.A.P.A. open to the review of his critical study of the poetry of Sara Teasdale.

“Let me read it to you,” Merchent said. “I’m not sure Mother’s heard this yet either.” I nodded. I don’t know what Jennifer did. I didn’t look at her. “ ‘There is real insight,’ ” Merchent began, “ ‘in Professor Merchent’s analysis of the dramatic polarities...’ ”

Margaret continued to sing softly to Sue Sue, who continued to whine softly to Margaret. When Merchent finished reading I said the proper things, glanced at my watch, pretended to be surprised, and said, “Son of a gun. I didn’t realize the time. I’ve got an exam tomorrow.”

Jennifer said, “I’ll drive you to the train, Boonie,” and went to get her coat and mine.

Merchent said, “We’ll have to do this more often, Boone,” and shook hands.

Sue Sue said, “You got my picture?”

I showed her that I did. Then Jennifer was back and we left.

On the ride to the station I said to Jennifer, “Maybe I should have taken two pictures.”

Jennifer said, “It wouldn’t have mattered. She’d have kept drawing until you eventually said no thank you and the rest would have been the same.”

“Oh,” I said. “That’s good, I was feeling guilty.”

Jennifer laughed briefly. “Join the group,” she said.

“What do you do for social life, Boonie?” Jennifer said. We were alone in the teaching fellows’ office, studying. It was evening and the building was empty except for us and the night cleaning man who shuffled about, dragging his big trash barrel and emptying wastebaskets into it. Jennifer had made us two cups of instant coffee with hot water from the office percolator, and we were taking a break.