Robert Parker - Love and Glory

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.

“I talk with you,” I said. “When I should be studying.”

“Besides that?”

“I haven’t much time for much besides that. I teach my two sections and grade freshmen compositions — ugh — and take my own classes and study and work weekends as a carpenter. Sometimes I have a couple of beers with the guys I work with.”

“No girls?”

I shook my head.

“That’s too bad,” Jennifer said. “You have a great capacity for affection.”

The fist that I kept clenched inside me tightened a little. “Yes,” I said. “I do.”

We were quiet, sipping coffee. Somewhere, on another floor, a vacuum cleaner hummed. Jennifer’s makeup was perfect, her hair exactly in place. She’d been at school since nine o’clock in the morning, but she looked as if she’d just arrived. Her commitment to her appearance was large. As we sat I thought about aging. Neither of us was old, but we looked different than we had. Jennifer’s face was more interesting now. There were no lines, no double chins, and yet it was the face of a thirty-six-year-old woman. What had changed?