Bread Upon the Waters (38 page)

Another keeper of journals in the family, Strand thought. Perhaps it was a hereditary disease. “She seems to have remembered every word,” he said.

“There’s more to come,” Leslie said. “When Caroline told him she wanted to be a veterinarian, he said that she was trying to save the wrong species. He knew where she should practice when she got her degree—in his old neighborhood in Manhattan. It was teeming with animals, he said, herds of them, on two legs, all of them sick. He said she’d be a lot more useful there than giving pills to de-worm Pekingeses. Caroline thought that he was making fun of her, but then he asked her, very seriously, if it would be all right if he wrote her. Caroline asked what he would want to write her about, and he said politics, murders, graft, poverty, the color of peoples’ skin, the lies of history, napalm and the hydrogen bomb, running back punts…. When you were his age, did you ever hear talk like that from anybody that young?”

“No,” Strand said. “Times were different then.”

“He said that he’d also practice writing a love letter or two.”

“The bastard,” Strand said.

“Oh, Allen, it’s just a boy trying to show an attractive girl that he’s more sophisticated than he is. And by the time they ever see each other again they won’t even remember each other’s names.”

“What did Caroline say—about the love letters, I mean?”

“She told me she said she didn’t think it would do any harm.” Leslie smiled as she said this, as though reassured that her shy daughter had finally caught on to the rules of the female game. “The boy wasn’t kidding,” Leslie said. “When we got to the college there was a letter from him, waiting for Caroline. She read it and gave it to me. It didn’t have a date or start with Dear Caroline or Dear Anything. It was just word for word the speech he’d made to her about the Algerians during dinner. It wasn’t even signed. Caroline said it was the first love letter she’d ever received. Of course she laughed at it, but she said she was going to keep it and show it to the other boys to improve the level of their conversation if they ever said any of the usual stupid thing to her.” Leslie scowled a little then. “I do hope she isn’t turning into a coquette. Just about every male on the campus stared at her every place we went.”

“You were the one who said she should have the nose job,” Strand said.

“Those are the risks you run,” Leslie said, but not lightly. She shook her head, as though to get rid of fears about her daughter. “She’ll probably change ten times before we see her again. With or without us.”

“You haven’t said a word about how Eleanor is doing,” Strand said. Leslie had flown to Georgia for a few days after Arizona to visit the young married couple. “Is she happy?”

“Very,” Leslie said, “as far as I could tell. Although the town is stultifying.”

“Leslie, darling,” Strand said, smiling, “that’s what you say about just about anyplace that isn’t New York.”

“I don’t say it about Boston or San Francisco or even Atlanta,” Leslie defended herself.

“Anyplace under a population of a million. I didn’t ask about the town. I asked about Eleanor and Giuseppe.”

“Well, they seem to be delighted with their work,” Leslie said grudgingly. “They feel they’ve improved the paper a hundred percent and they seem to devote sixteen hours a day to it. They have a big old house which looks as though it’s falling down. It’s like a cross between Tobacco Road, cleaned up for the movies, and an antebellum plantation. Eleanor says it’s perfect for newlyweds. When they have an argument they can sleep in bedrooms so far apart they have to communicate with each other by shortwave. I only got to talk to them in fits and starts. Whenever we sat down to a meal, the telephone rang and one or the other of them would have to charge out and do something. It would drive me crazy, but they both seem to be thriving on it. When I tried to find out if they were making or losing money they immediately changed the subject. They seemed to be crazy about each other and I suppose that’s the main thing.” She wriggled out of his encircling arm and said, “Goodness, it must be past midnight. Is there any hot water? I must take a bath, I’ve been traveling all day.”

“There’s hot water. At least I think so. Don’t you want a drink first, to celebrate being home?”

“Maybe after the bath. I’ll signal when ready.” She bent over and kissed him. “Did you miss me?”

“What do you think?”

She laughed and went in and in a moment he heard the water running.

When he went in a few minutes later, she was already in bed, her hair brushed and shining. He undressed and got into the bed and snuggled up to her. He began to caress her, but she pulled away gently. “I’m afraid, darling,” she said. He didn’t have to ask what she was afraid of. Dr. Prinz had warned him. Even obeying Dr. Prinz’s orders, pampering and denying himself at the same time, he was still subject to sudden fits of fatigue when he could hardly make himself walk across the campus or face a class.

“Of course,” he said, and moved to the other side of the bed. This is impossible, he thought. Tomorrow night I’ll sleep in the other room.

From then on, without discussion, Jimmy’s narrow old bed in the other bedroom was made up for him each night.

Well, he thought, as he sat at his desk, remembering in front of the fire, that was a good night in our marriage, considering everything.

He sighed, stood up, stretched, put a log on the dwindling fire because he was not yet ready for sleep and went into the kitchen and poured himself a drink of whiskey and water.

He went back into the living room, carrying his drink. Above him he heard the sound of footsteps. The old wooden house creaked and groaned and all movements were betrayed through its beams; He was sure that there was a certain amount of prohibited visiting after hours among the boys. He did not wish to learn what the nocturnal traffic meant. An illegal cigarette perhaps, the passing of a marijuana joint from one hand to another, homosexual experiments, the sharing of smuggled liquor, a more or less innocent rap session. A dedicated and conscientious teacher, he thought, would steal upstairs as quietly as possible and catch the culprits at their teenage crimes and bring down upon their heads appropriate punishment. What appropriate punishment was for any crime in this day and age would be difficult to figure out. At least in the public school system he hadn’t had to worry about what his students did once they left his classes. As always, you had to live in consideration of a balance between profits and losses. As long as his charges didn’t burn the house down, a benevolent blind eye was a useful piece of equipment. He hadn’t asked the other teachers what their systems for maintaining order were and nobody had volunteered any advice to him. He wondered what a teacher from Eton or Harrow, schools where caning, as far as he knew, was still practiced, would think of his conduct. Would such a pedagogue march boldly up the stairs, uphold the law, grimly mete out so many strokes of the cane for smoking, so many for drinking, so many for talking after hours? How many for buggery? None, from what he had read. Go, and do thou likewise. Strand grinned at the thought. His own son was no older than some of the boys in the house and Strand had never punished him except by a sharp word, rarely spoken. If Jimmy had gone to Dunberry or Eton or Harrow instead of to a public high school, would he now be immersed in the world of bearded guitarists and orgiastic millionaire rock stars doomed to die before the age of thirty from overdoses of heroin or uppers and downers?

He put his drink down on the desk, seated himself, hesitated, then picked up his pen and began to write.

I have been musing upon the differences between the old-time system of education in the English language and the permissive order we have now in which students are awarded degrees for some of the most inconsequential dabbling the tutorial mind can imagine. When one thinks of the poets, philosophers, statesmen, and soldiers turned out by the old British system and by the church-oriented colleges of the United States that have endured since colonial times, it is difficult to believe that we are doing as well for our children as our ancestors did for theirs. We live in the most curious of times, where at the same moment liberalism has gone amok in our educational systems while discipline and repression have gone amok in most of the world’s political systems. The two things must be somehow linked, although it is too late in the night for me to find those links. The English schools found place for eccentrics: do we find place for scholars? Gentlemen? Poets? It is a nice subject to bring up with Romero. Or should I merely go to the headmaster and tell him that the boy is dangerous and a threat to us all and have him dropped from the school immediately? But I know I won’t do it. I am affected as we all are here, as Russell Hazen is, too, by the liberal superstition which, with all that has happened, still impels us decently or guiltily to spend our treasure and our goodwill in educating and even arming our own Arabs, our own fellahin, our invited Iranians. I will not discuss this in the faculty common room over tea. I am the odd man out among them, as it is, and when they ask me about my career in the public schools they sound as though they were asking questions of a man who has spent the best years of his life in a combat zone.

On the whole, though, they are good people, lacking in that quality, ambition, which so often makes people repugnant.

The word ambition itself leads to endless speculation. Just last week Hazen telephoned me, ostensibly to apologize for not being able to come and visit us and to find out how I was doing. I told him, not completely candidly, that everything was going along splendidly. Then he said he had a little problem to talk to me about. It was not about his divorce problems or the pretty lady lawyer from Paris, as I half-guessed it would be, but about Eleanor and Gianelli. I told him that when Leslie had visited them she thought they were doing very well. Hazen was of a different opinion. He had talked with his friend the publisher, who had warned him that the two young people were too ambitious by far, changing routines that had made the paper prosper for almost a half century, firing old hands, bringing in know-it-all kids from eastern schools of journalism, antagonizing the townspeople by their high-handedness. Eleanor, it seems, was being blamed even more than her husband. “They say she’s leading her husband around with a ring in his nose,” Hazen said the publisher told him. “And he complains that they treat him as though he’s a fragile relic from another century. He may be exaggerating,” Hazen said, “but it wouldn’t be amiss if you could advise them to show a little patience.”

I promised to do what I could. I didn’t tell him that I didn’t have much hope of influencing Eleanor and felt that I would have to get Gianelli off to one side in a private conversation if I wanted to try to do anything with him. Besides, they have no plans that I know of to visit here and a trip to Georgia would only be a useless expense.

When I put the phone down, I sighed involuntarily. When one is poor in one’s youth, even if later on one is quite comfortably fixed, thinking about money is an activity which can send one into a state that borders on anything from a slight uneasiness to terror.

I had never had any illusions about being rich and I hadn’t longed for the toys and choices of wealth. I was never a gambler and knew that the windfalls of luck would never be mine. I had chosen a profession for love of teaching, for the opportunities of scholarly leisure, for the assurance it had seemed then to offer of a decent if modest style of living. As I rose in the school system my salary increased proportionately and met all our reasonable needs, with the prospect that when I was forced to retire the blows of old age would be softened by an adequate pension. Like most Americans I was not prepared for the spiraling realities of inflation. The disasters it had caused for the middle classes of the countries of Europe could not descend, we thought, upon America. As a historian I knew we were not immune to change, but I shared the common belief that if America was no longer a fortress in military terms, our monetary system, at least, would resist invasion in our lifetimes. On a more personal level I had never imagined that at the age of fifty a nearly mortal illness would make me alter my entire mode of life and force me to earn my bread in a different place and under radically different rules.

If I had continued working until retirement age in the public school system, my pension would have been fair enough. Under ordinary circumstances, although we would have had to move to a smaller apartment, I could suppose that we could survive comfortably, even a little better than comfortably, with enough left over to be able to visit a child who lived a thousand miles away from us, when the necessity arose. My salary here is much less than I was earning in the city and even though we get the house rent-free, if I had to buy a new suit or Leslie needed a new coat, it would mean some close and anxious planning on our part. Leslie of course doesn’t complain, but I would be fooling myself if I thought that some of the tension reflected in her face is not…

The phone rang. He stared at the instrument stupidly. Calls that late at night were frightening, especially since Leslie was not in the house with him. He let the phone ring two more times before he picked it up, trying to control the shaking in his hands.

But it was only Russell Hazen. His voice was reassuringly normal. “I hope I’m not waking you, Allen,” he said.

“Actually,” Strand said, “I was sitting at my desk catching up on my work.”

“Don’t overdo it,” Hazen said. “One heart attack is enough.”

“I agree with you there,” Strand said, relieved that there were no accidents to report, no crises to be attended to.

“It’s just that I’ve been so busy,” Hazen said. “I’ve just gotten in from a conference. And I wanted to catch you as soon as I could.”

“What is it, Russell?” Strand asked. “Have you been talking to your friend in Georgia again?”

“No. I haven’t heard from him, so I guess things have been going better down there. Actually…” He hesitated for a moment. “Actually, it’s about me. It’s nothing very important, but it just possibly might involve you, too.” He laughed a little oddly. He sounded embarrassed, Strand thought. “You remember that oil man—at least that lobbyist I met at lunch when I was up at the school…?”