Insomnia (23 page)

Crying was perhaps too strong a word;
leaking
might have been better. McGovern sat with a handkerchief sticking out of one gnarled fist, watching a mother and her young son play roll-toss along the first-base line of the diamond where the last big softball event of the season – the Intramural City Tournament – had concluded just two days before.

Every now and then he would raise the fist with the handkerchief in it to his face and swipe at his eyes. Ralph, who had never seen McGovern weep – not even at Carolyn’s funeral – loitered near the playground for a few moments, wondering if he should approach McGovern or just go back the way he had come.

At last he gathered up his courage and walked over to the park bench. ‘’Lo, Bill,’ he said.

McGovern looked up with eyes that were red, watery, and a trifle embarrassed. He wiped them again and tried a smile. ‘Hi, Ralph. You caught me snivelling. Sorry.’

‘It’s okay,’ Ralph said, sitting down. ‘I’ve done my share of it. What’s wrong?’

McGovern shrugged, then dabbed at his eyes again. ‘Nothing much. I’m suffering the effects of a paradox, that’s all.’

‘What paradox is that?’

‘Something good is happening to one of my oldest friends – the man who hired me for my first teaching position, in fact. He’s dying.’

Ralph raised his eyebrows but said nothing.

‘He’s got pneumonia. His niece will probably haul him off to the hospital today or tomorrow, and they’ll put him on a ventilator, at least for awhile, but he’s almost certainly dying. I’ll celebrate his death when it comes, and I suppose it’s that more than anything else that’s depressing the shit out of me.’ McGovern paused. ‘You don’t understand a thing I’m saying, do you?’

‘Nope,’ Ralph said. ‘But that’s all right.’

McGovern looked into his face, did a doubletake, then snorted. The sound was harsh and thick with his tears, but Ralph thought it was a real laugh just the same, and risked a small return smile.

‘Did I say something funny?’

‘No,’ McGovern said, and clapped him lightly on the shoulder. ‘I was just looking at your face, so earnest and sincere – you’re really an open book, Ralph – and thinking how much I like you. Sometimes I wish I could
be
you.’

‘Not at three in the morning, you wouldn’t,’ Ralph said quietly.

McGovern sighed and nodded. ‘The insomnia.’

‘That’s right. The insomnia.’

‘I’m sorry I laughed, but—’

‘No apology necessary, Bill.’

‘– but please believe me when I say it was an
admiring
laugh.’

‘Who’s your friend, and why’s it a good thing that he’s dying?’ Ralph asked. He already had a guess as to what lay at the root of McGovern’s paradox; he was not quite as goodheartedly dense as Bill sometimes seemed to think.

‘His name’s Bob Polhurst, and his pneumonia is good news because he’s suffered from Alzheimer’s since the summer of ’88.’

It was what Ralph had thought . . . although AIDS had crossed his mind, as well. He wondered if that would shock McGovern, and felt a small ripple of amusement at the idea. Then he looked at the man and felt ashamed of his amusement. He knew that when it came to gloom McGovern was at least a semi-pro, but he didn’t believe that made his obvious grief over his old friend any less genuine.

‘Bob was head of the History Department at Derry High from 1948, when he couldn’t have been more than twenty-five, until 1981 or ’82. He was a great teacher, one of those fiercely bright people you sometimes find out in the sticks, hiding their lights under bushels. They usually end up heading their departments and running half a dozen extra-curricular activities on the side because they simply don’t know how to say no. Bob sure didn’t.’

The mother was now leading her little boy past them and toward the little snackbar that would be closing up for the season very soon now. The kid’s face had an extraordinary translucence, a beauty that was enhanced by the rose-colored aura Ralph saw revolving about his head and moving across his small, lively face in calm waves.

‘Can we go home, Mommy?’ he asked. ‘I want to use my Play-Doh now. I want to make the Clay Family.’

‘Let’s get something to eat first, big boy – ’kay? Mommy’s hungry.’

‘Okay.’

There was a hook-shaped scar across the bridge of the boy’s nose, and here the rosy glow of his aura deepened to scarlet.

Fell out of his crib when he was eight months old,
Ralph thought.
Reaching for the butterflies on the mobile his mom hung from the ceiling. It scared her to death when she ran in and saw all the blood; she thought the poor kid was dying. Patrick, that’s his name. She calls him Pat. He’s named after his grandfather, and—

He closed his eyes tightly for a moment. His stomach was fluttering lightly just below his Adam’s apple and he was suddenly sure he was going to vomit.

‘Ralph?’ McGovern asked. ‘Are you all right?’

He opened his eyes. No aura, rose-colored or otherwise; just a mother and son heading over to the snackbar for a cold drink, and there was no way, absolutely no way that he could tell she didn’t want to take Pat home because Pat’s father was drinking again after almost six months on the wagon, and when he drank he got mean—

‘I’m okay,’ he told McGovern. ‘Got a speck in my eye is all. Go on. Finish telling me about your friend.’

‘Not much to tell. He was a genius, but over the years I’ve become convinced that genius is a vastly overrated commodity. I think this country is
full
of geniuses, guys and gals so bright they make your average card-carrying MENSA member look like Fucko the Clown. And I think that most of them are teachers, living and working in small-town obscurity because that’s the way they like it. It was certainly the way Bob Polhurst liked it.

‘He saw into people in a way that seemed scary to me . . . at first, anyway. After awhile you found out you didn’t have to be scared, because Bob was kind, but at first he inspired a sense of dread. You sometimes wondered if it was an ordinary pair of eyes he was using to look at you, or some kind of X-ray machine.’

At the snackbar, the woman was bending down with a small paper cup of soda. The kid reached up for it with both hands, grinning, and took it. He drank thirstily. The rosy glow pulsed briefly into existence around him again as he did, and Ralph knew he had been right: the kid’s name was Patrick, and his mother didn’t want to take him home. There was no way he could know such things, but he did just the same.

‘In those days,’ McGovern said, ‘if you were from central Maine and not one hundred per cent heterosexual, you tried like hell to
pass
for it. That was the only choice there was, outside of moving to Greenwich Village and wearing a beret and spending Saturday nights in the kind of jazz clubs where they used to applaud by snapping their fingers. Back then, the idea of “coming out of the closet” was ridiculous. For most of us the closet was all there was. Unless you wanted a pack of liquored-up fraternity boys sitting on you in an alley and trying to pull your face off, the
world
was your closet.’

Pat finished his drink and tossed his paper cup on the ground. His mother told him to pick it up and put it in the litter basket, a task he performed with immense good cheer. Then she took his hand and they began to walk slowly out of the park. Ralph watched them go with a feeling of trepidation, hoping the woman’s fears and worries would turn out to be unjustified, fearing that they wouldn’t be.

‘When I applied for a job in the Derry High history department – this was in 1951 – I was fresh from two years teaching in the sticks, way to hell and gone in Lubec, and I figured if I could get along up there with no questions being asked, I could get along anywhere. But Bob took one look at me – hell,
inside
me – with those X-ray eyes of his and just knew. And he wasn’t shy, either. “If I decide to offer you this job and you decide to take it, Mr McGovern, may I be assured that there will never be so much as an iota of trouble over the matter of your sexual preference?”

‘
Sexual preference,
Ralph! Man, oh man! I’d never even
dreamed
of such a phrase before that day, but it came sliding out of his mouth slicker than a ball-bearing coated with Crisco. I started to get up on my high horse, tell him I didn’t have the slightest idea what he was talking about but I resented the hell out of it just the same – on general principles, you might say – and then I took another look at him and decided to save my energy. I might have fooled some people up in Lubec, but I wasn’t fooling Bob Polhurst. He wasn’t thirty himself yet, probably hadn’t been south of Kittery more than a dozen times in his whole life, but he knew everything that mattered about me, and all it had taken him to find it out was one twenty-minute interview.

‘“No, sir, not an iota,” I said, just as meek as Mary’s little lamb.’

McGovern dabbed at his eyes with the handkerchief again, but Ralph had an idea that this time the gesture was mostly theatrical.

‘In the twenty-three years before I went off to teach at Derry Community College, Bob taught me everything I know about teaching history and playing chess. He was a brilliant player . . . he certainly would have given that windbag Faye Chapin some hard bark to chew on, I can tell you that. I only beat him once, and that was after the Alzheimer’s started to take hold. I never played him again after that.

‘And there were other things. He never forgot a joke. He never forgot the birthdays or anniversaries of the people who were close to him – he didn’t send cards or give gifts, but he always offered congratulations and good wishes, and no one ever doubted his sincerity. He published over sixty articles on teaching history and on the Civil War, which was his specialty. In 1967 and 1968 he wrote a book called
Later That Summer,
about what happened in the months following Gettysburg. He let me read the manuscript ten years ago, and I think it’s the best book on the Civil War I’ve ever read – the only one that even comes close is a novel called
The Killer Angels,
by Michael Shaara. Bob wouldn’t hear of publishing it, though. When I asked him why, he said that I of all people should understand his reasons.’

McGovern paused briefly, looking out across the park, which was filled with green-gold light and black interlacings of shadow which moved and shifted with each breath of wind.

‘He said he had a fear of exposure.’

‘Okay,’ Ralph said. ‘I get it.’

‘Maybe this sums him up best of all: he used to do the big
Sunday New York Times
crossword puzzle in ink. I poked him about that once – accused him of
hubris
. He gave me a grin and said, “There’s a big difference between pride and optimism, Bill – I’m an optimist, that’s all.”

‘Anyway, you get the picture. A kind man, a good teacher, a brilliant mind. His specialty was the Civil War, and now he doesn’t even know what a civil war is, let alone who won ours. Hell, he doesn’t even know his own name, and at some point soon – the sooner the better, actually – he’s going to die without any idea that he ever lived.’

A middle-aged man in a University of Maine tee-shirt and a pair of ragged blue jeans came shuffling through the playground, carrying a crumpled paper shopping bag under one arm. He stopped beside the snackbar to examine the contents of the waste-barrel, hoping for a returnable or two. As he bent over, Ralph saw the dark green envelope which surrounded him and the lighter green balloon-string which rose, wavering, from the crown of his head. And suddenly he was too tired to close his eyes, too tired to wish it away.

He turned to McGovern and said, ‘Ever since last month I’ve been seeing stuff that—’

‘I guess I’m in mourning,’ McGovern said, giving his eyes another theatrical wipe, ‘although I don’t know if it’s for Bob or for me. Isn’t that a hoot? But if you could have seen how bright he was in those days . . . how goddam scary-bright . . .’

‘Bill? You see that guy over there by the snackbar? The one rooting through the trash barrel? I see—’

‘Yeah, those guys are all over the place now,’ McGovern said, giving the wino (who had found two empty Budweiser cans and tucked them into his bag) a cursory glance before turning to Ralph again. ‘I hate being old – I guess maybe that’s all it really comes down to. I mean big-time.’

The wino approached their bench in a bent-kneed shuffle, the breeze heralding his arrival with a smell which was not English Leather. His aura – a sprightly and energetic green that made Ralph think of Saint Patrick’s Day decorations – went oddly with his subservient posture and sickly grin.

‘Say, you guys! How you doon?’

‘We’ve been better,’ McGovern said, hoisting the satiric eyebrow, ‘and I expect we’ll be better again once you shove off.’

The wino looked at McGovern uncertainly, seemed to decide he was a lost cause, and shifted his gaze to Ralph. ‘You got a bitta spare change, mister? I gotta get to Dexter. My uncle call me out dere at the Shelter on Neibolt Street, say I can have my old job back at the mill, but only if I—’

‘Get lost, chum,’ McGovern said.

The wino gave him a brief, anxious glance, and then his bloodshot brown eyes rolled back to Ralph again. ‘Dass a good job, you know? I could have it back, but on’y if I get dere today. Dere’s a bus—’

Ralph reached into his pocket, found a quarter and a dime, and dropped them into the outstretched hand. The wino grinned. The aura surrounding him brightened, then suddenly disappeared. Ralph found that a great relief.

‘Hey, great! Thank you, mister!’

‘Don’t mention it,’ Ralph said.

The wino lurched off in the direction of the Shop ’n Save, where such brands as Night Train, Old Duke, and Silver Satin were always on sale.

Oh shit, Ralph, would it hurt you to be a little charitable in your head, as well?
he asked himself.
Go another half a mile in that direction, you come to the bus station
.