Fallen Idols (28 page)

His academic life, as of today, was officially over. The university didn't know that, but he did. He hadn't realized how much he had wanted to make that decision, until it was thrust upon him by his brothers’ generosity. Naturally, he was concerned about life outside the gilded birdcage, beyond temporary bartender's job in his brother's saloon; but that problem would take care of itself down the line. What was important, overwhelming, exhilarating, was that he was
free!
He felt as if a tremendous weight had been lifted from his shoulders, a blindfold removed from over his eyes.

The revelation, although it had come after years of indecision, had been simple: he didn't want to be an academic. He had come to understand, finally, that the world of the university had been his father's life, and that he couldn't follow that act. Walt Gaines cast too wide a shadow. Even now with the pall that had fallen over him, he was still formidable. Too formidable for any of his sons to follow in his footsteps.

Clancy and Will had always known that. They had never considered emulating Walt. Tom, though, was the stubborn brother, the one who couldn't stop banging his head against the wall. He was going to prove he could compete on the same level.

But he hadn't, and he wasn't going to. At best, he'd be a run-of-the-mill professor at some run-of-the-mill college. It was time to get out of the shadows, literally and figuratively

His first reaction to his brothers’ phone calls, though, had been confusion mixed with irritation: a free room in his kid brother's ritzy apartment and a job working nights at his older brother's bar? His knee-jerk reaction had been to tell them thanks but no thanks: he was happy where he was, he was finally finishing his dissertation, he was looking forward to his fall teaching assignments. He even told them he'd recently met a woman he was seeing regularly. He appreciated the sentiment, he'd said, but he was staying put.

All of which was a total crock. He was overwhelmed with self-loathing and self-anger almost as soon as ha hung up after their calls. He was stuck on his thesis. He knew it, and he suspected his advisor did, too, and had been uttering mealy-mouthed pieties about presenting it in the spring to avoid an unpleasant confrontation. Although he had once truly loved teaching he had now come to loathe it, particularly at the level at which he was doing it. It was remedial pabulum, basic stuff any respectable math major should have learned as a high school sophomore or junior.

The story about the new woman he'd met was the lowest deceit. He hadn't had a date since his return from L.A. The only women he had met in months had been Renee from the Venice bar, an encounter that had resulted in his being seriously beaten up, and Emma Rawlings.

Emma. He thought about her constantly, incessantly. Often he could think of nothing else but her. Several times he had picked up the phone to call his father, not to speak to him, but because she might pick up the phone. But he never made the call. She didn't pick up Walt's phone, and even if she had, what good would have come of it? Any contact with her, even her voice over a line from two thousand miles away, would only tear him up inside even more. There were times, when seeing them making love in his mind's eye, he would become enraged with his father—not because of the betrayal of his mother's memory, but because his father had already had his special, perfect woman. Why did he have to be a hog and suction away another? Why couldn't Emma have been his woman instead?

Because she wasn't. And if her relationship with his father ended tomorrow, she never would be, either. He still had no comprehension, intellectually or emotionally, of why she had selected him to be her lover for that one nigh — the mercy fuck theme, getting back at Walt for being an asshole, the other possibilities, he knew none of them held any water. It was something basic in her, that he would never begin to know or understand.

It would have been better if having sex with her had sever happened. He wouldn't be a slave to the memory, as he was now.

He hadn't told his brothers about that night. He wanted to—he wanted to tell someone, partly for bragging rights and also because he was bursting from holding the awesome secret in, but he didn't know how, and more important, if he should. It would complicate an already tangled situation, and he didn't feel that it had any direct relationship to the rest of the problem they were facing.

Maybe, down the line, facts would emerge that would change his mind. For now, he was going to have to keep what had happened to himself.

He drove I-94 west across Michigan, passing through Battle Creek, Kalamazoo, reaching the eastern shore of Lake Michigan at Benton Harbor, continuing south into Indiana, a mercifully short drive through the squalor of Gray and Hammond, and then he was over the Illinois line and into Chicago. Piloting his car and the balky trailer through heavy city traffic, he maneuvered onto Lake Shore Drive, made his way through the center of town, then to Will's neighborhood.

He parked illegally in front of a fire hydrant, the only way he could fit his caravan into a space, got out of his car, and stared up at Will's building. So this is how someone Will's age—my kid brother—lives when he's making money, he thought. And that thought was followed by another—there's more to life than material pleasures, but man, have I been missing out.

Madison

C
lancy found a space in the visitors’ parking lot without having to circle it a dozen times. A lucky omen, he hoped—parking spaces were almost always impossible to find. After getting out of the car and stretching to work the road kinks out of his back, he walked across the campus to the administration building, where the office of the university's retirement benefit program was located.

Because he wasn't in a hurry, and wanted to see the changing of the season, he had peeled off the I-90 at Rockford and motored up old U.S. 20 to Freeport, from which point he had headed north into Wisconsin on even smaller, less-traveled state and county roads that were cut through thick stands of forest. The fall season, which had been late in arriving, had finally exploded over the northern Midwest. The leaves of the elm, oak, beech, ash, walnut, and chestnut trees were changing colors so rapidly they almost appeared to be transforming before his eyes as he watched. When he was a kid, one of the traditional chores he and his brothers had been assigned was to rake the leaves from the front and back lawns of their parents’ house. The boys would form monster-sized piles, taller than they were, and then would jump into the mounds as if they were wild dogs, scattering them all over the yard. Then they would rake them up again, and repeat the process. After they were done messing around, Walt would light the ceremonial fires and they'd watch the dry, burnt leaves curl up in smoke into the graying late-afternoon sky.

Yesterday, he and Callie had gone around the neighborhood collecting trash bags of fallen leaves, which she was going to use to create festive decorations for Halloween and Thanksgiving. Making wreaths and other ornamental pieces from the leavings of nature was going to be one of Callie's contributions to the building of their own traditions.
If
their mother were still alive, and
if
their father hadn't gone off into his new and frightening life, it would be perfect.

But those were two insurmountable
ifs
too many.

“I went ahead and pulled your parents’ records,” the administrator told Clancy, as he settled into a university-logo-emblazoned captain's chair in front of her desk. Her name plaque identified her as Rebecca Duckworth. She was an open-faced, cheerful-looking woman. Tortoiseshell bifocals hung from a chain around her neck. Although she had the heat turned up, she was wearing a forest green turtleneck sweater under her dun-colored J. Crew jumper. Clancy had spoken on the phone with her yesterday, when he'd called and told her what he was looking for.

“This is confidential information” — she tapped a short, unpolished fingernail on one of the files on the desk in front of her—”but since you are their son and are helping administer your late mother's affairs for your dad, I can bend the rules.” She smiled, as if to let him know she wanted to be helpful. “What a sad business that was,” she added sympathetically.

She opened the thicker of the two files. “It was untimely that your father resigned when he did,” she said. She paused for a moment to put on her glasses and wet a finger to turn a page. “From a financial point of view,” she added, looking up at him. With her thick glasses on, her weak, pale gray eyes were magnified.

“Because of … ?” Clancy ventured.

“His age. His length of tenure, also.”

“Right.” Clancy wasn't sure what she meant, but he didn't want her to know that he knew less than she presumed he did.

“He was too young,” she amplified, glancing down at the document in front of her. “Ordinarily, fully tenured professors don't retire at age sixty. The ones who do, generally ally, do so because of health problems. Your father, from what I understand, was not in ill health.”

Clancy nodded. “His health is fine.” His physical health, he thought. Mentally, that was different. None of her business.

“That's good to hear.” She frowned. “His decision was costly to him, though.” She scanned the page in front of her. “If he had stayed on for another year and a half, the academic year he cut short, plus one more, he would have had thirty years as a full professor. His retirement package at that point would have been considerably more substantial.” She looked up at Clancy and smiled. “It's like being in the military or the civil service,” she explained. “When you reach certain milestones, your benefits are better. I suppose he felt he had no choice,” she added, seemingly embarrassed.

“He was in an uncomfortable position,” Clancy reminded her, since she had already alluded to the situation.

“Yes, I know. Many of us were dismayed. It was a hotly discussed topic.” She hesitated. “I'm talking out of school here,” she said softly, as if the walls had ears, “but he didn't have to go.”

Clancy gave her a guarded shrug.

“The university would have kept him on if he had fought for his job,” she continued. “They would have had to, he was one of the most popular professors here. And getting rid of a tenured professor is not easy,” she continued, her face grimacing. “The faculty senate was prepared to stand by him.” She paused for a moment. “The impression we all got was that he didn't want to stay any longer and used the fallout from that trip as an excuse.”

“It was his decision,” Clancy said firmly. The woman was trying to be kind, but this was an uncomfortable discussion.

“Of course.” She turned some pages. “You're aware of the changes your parents made in their distribution, aren't you?”

“I knew they had …” He backtracked, because he didn't know. “Run that by me, would you? The details.”

“Here, take a look.” She came from behind her desk, stood over his shoulder, and turned the file toward him, so he could read it. She smelled faintly of camphor. “Until a few years ago—about a year before you mother …” She hesitated.

“Died,” he said firmly.

“Yes.” She ran her finger along the page. “Up until then, they had been enrolled in the standard defined benefit plan, with full survivor benefits.” She lifted her eyes from the page so she could look at him. “That's done for the financial protection of the surviving partner, particularly if that partner has a smaller pension, which was the case with your parents. Your dad's pension, given his status, and length of tenure, was substantially greater than your mother's. In other words, if your father had passed away before your mother did, instead of what actually happened, she would have gotten more money from his pension plan. The downside, of course, is that under that plan, the beneficiary, who would have been your father under those circumstances, would have gotten less per month, because more was being saved for your mother.”

“So what was the change?” Clancy asked guardedly.

She glanced at the page again, then looked back to him. “It was redone so that when she retired, all of her benefits would come to her. Had she passed away first, which from an actuarial perspective was unlikely, given that she was younger and a woman, he wouldn't get anything from her plan.”

“I see,” he said slowly. He didn't, not yet.

“His plan, on the other hand,” she continued, “remained as it had been.”

“So if she died first,” Clancy said, thinking this through, “he wouldn't get any of hers, but if he died, she'd get some of his.”

She nodded. “That is correct. And that's not uncommon,” she pointed out. “His package was substantially larger than hers, so that if they both retired, they could still live comfortably on his partial benefits and her full ones; but the opposite wouldn't be true, because her benefits were much smaller, so if he had taken his plan in full, as she'd done with hers, she would have gotten less if she had survived him. Much less,” she added.

This is a surprise, Clancy thought reflexively—both the alteration of his mother's plan, and his father's unselfish magnanimity in maintaining his own. His father wanted to make sure his wife was properly taken care of in case he died first.

Clancy felt a surge of good feeling toward his father. It was the first feeling like this he'd had for months. “Yes,” he said, now understanding. “He didn't need any of her money. He had enough of his own.” To live as he had then, not as he was now. That was still a major obstacle. “And he has his book deals, lectures. He has years of quality service still ahead of him.”

It sounded strange to his ears, proclaiming this defense of his father. He realized that he hadn't done that for months; just the opposite.

Rebecca Duckworth nodded vigorously. “Of course he could. He
should.
He's a valuable resource. Men like your father shouldn't be discarded because of a tragedy that was not of their making.”

The insurance agent, Milt Longoria, had known Walt and Jocelyn Gaines for almost thirty years, from shortly after Clancy was born and the young couple bought their first life insurance policy. He and Clancy squeezed into a small booth in a restaurant a block from the state capital, near where his office was located. It was lunchtime—the café was crowded with politicians and their staffs. Snippets of conversation floated in the air affirmative action policies at the university, funding for this or that bill, deals to be cut, the dumbness of Washington politics that they had to deal with on the state level; the usual swapping and embellishing of stories. Brett Favre and the Packers were prime topics of discussion—they had a real shot at winning the Super Bowl this year. Just like in my own joint, Clancy thought as he listened to the boisterous caterwauling Sports and politics, the dual American secular obsessions.