Straight Man (31 page)

Since this newspaper printed the story of Lucky Hank’s first dog some weeks ago, its author has received three or four times the usual amount of mail (the exact numbers I leave to the reader’s imagination), most of it wanting to know more about my father, William Henry Devereaux, Sr., whom I left with blistered hands, standing knee deep in a just-dug grave, wearing ruined chinos and loafers, about to bury a dog I’d managed to kill about two minutes after my father brought him home. My mother, who is well-known to readers of this newspaper (her columns generate far more mail than mine), objected to the story as I told it, claiming that the portrait of my father was unflattering, unfair, and unkind, but the response of other readers suggests the opposite. Their hearts went out instinctively to the father in the story. Several readers shared with me stories of their own valiant attempts to please their own stubborn, ungrateful children. They felt bad for my father and wondered if there was any news of him. They wondered if I had any more stories I could tell about William Henry Devereaux, Sr., stories that
would be more about him and less about me. And so, I pick up my father’s story where I left off
.

Not long after the dog was buried, my father was made two attractive offers. The first was a full professorship from Columbia University, which he accepted. As I mentioned before, by this time my father was already a very famous scholar, and he was apparently weary of all the distinguished visiting professor gigs that were the texture of my childhood and early adolescence. He may have felt it was time to settle down, as my mother had for some time been suggesting. The second attractive offer came from a young woman graduate student from his D. H. Lawrence seminar, and it was with her that he settled down in New York
.

The Columbia deal was sweet. The university offered him a luxurious apartment within easy walking distance of the campus and partially subsidized it for him. His salary, for the late sixties, was unheard of, and in return for it, he was required to do relatively little in the classroom. He was the nominal editor of a prestigious scholarly magazine, as well as director of a special collection in the library, but he was also assigned a research assistant, who attended to many of his duties, including the grading of papers in the one undergraduate class he taught each year. Papers from the tiny graduate seminar he graded himself. That is, he placed a letter grade on them and for all anyone knew may even have read them. He had written five distinguished books of literary criticism, one of which, dealing with politics and the novel, had become wildly popular in the way that an occasional scholarly book on a fashionable subject will catch on. Everyone buys it, displays it, discusses it, without finding the time to actually read it. His real job at Columbia was to continue writing such books, to thank the university profusely for its encouragement, and to ensure that all subsequent editions of books he had written elsewhere would make mention of the fact that he now held a prestigious named chair at Columbia
.

Still, even though teaching was not a significant part of his responsibilities in his new position, the university must have been surprised, given its modest expectations, to learn upon his arrival that my father was unable to perform. I know my father was surprised. What befell him was unprecedented. He arrived at his first class in September, read the names of his students off his roster, opened his mouth to begin a lecture he had delivered half a dozen times before, only to discover that his mind was
completely blank, that he was unable to speak so much as a pertinent syllable. He was not confused about what he wanted to say, nor had he forgotten how he’d meant to begin, or the lecture’s key details. His mind was simply voided, as if the thoughts in his head were composed of iron filings and he was standing too close to a magnet. He scanned the expectant faces before him and felt complete panic descend upon him. He had all he could do to find the words to excuse himself for a moment and duck out into the hall for a drink at the water fountain, his throat having become a valley of cinders. There in the dark hallway my father’s entire lecture returned to him intact, but the panic did not dissipate, so he found a nearby men’s room and drew a brown paper towel from the wall dispenser. On this dubious parchment he wrote out in longhand the first two sentences of his lecture as a hedge against repetition of the strangest event of his life, and then he returned to his classroom, not without misgivings for all his sensible precaution. There behind the lectern he unfolded his paper towel and opened his mouth to begin, only to discover that the words, the very letters the words were composed of, had become scrambled. They swam before him merrily, rearranging themselves for his entertainment. This quickly, all understanding had fled. He couldn’t have identified the letter
B
for a free trip to
Sesame Street,
this despite the fact that he had written a long chapter on that program for his book on pop culture. A new wave of panic crashed over him, and he knew there was nothing to do but plead illness, cancel class, tell students to return on Thursday, at which time he hoped to be himself
.

Word of this incident traveled, as academic gossip always does, at warp speed. It had been an early afternoon class, and by late afternoon everyone on the faculty seemed to have heard of William Henry Devereaux’s strange paralysis at the lectern. And, as is the case with most academic gossip, most of the facts had gotten skewed. My father’s colleagues seemed confused by the fact that he was able to communicate with them in the hallways. At a department cocktail party that evening they were amazed to find him not only present but charming and eloquent on the subject of his bizarre dysfunction, turning his still fresh humiliation into a comic set piece in which he described everything swimming before his eyes, words suddenly devoid of meaning, letters of phonic significance. It was as if, he explained, he had been transported back through time to a point before the invention of written language. He had a memory of what it was and how it worked, but it
all seemed rather foolish. My father’s colleagues laughed appreciatively at his recounting of the event, but he could tell that they were horrified, that what he was detailing for them was their worst nightmare come to life. Unable to
talk?
A failure of
discourse?
A confession of sexual impotence could not have struck them more forcefully, and the fact that my father was able to make light of such a circumstance elevated him, if possible, in their estimation. To be so brilliant, and yet be unable to speak. This was the stuff of classical tragedy. How wonderful that he was able to come back from hell and tell them about it. What good luck it was that his affliction was confined, apparently, to the classroom, that it did not bleed over into faculty cocktail parties
.

Of course, the reason that my father was able to be glib and entertaining regarding his affliction was that he was convinced he’d seen the last of it. In truth he had been terrified to attend the cocktail party, afraid that he would be struck dumb there as well. What a relief to discover that his verbal acuity had not deserted him in the company of his colleagues. He had feared that his paralysis might be a manifestation of stage fright associated with the fact that he had a new job, his first in over a decade where he was expected to stay on for more than a year or two. The cocktail party suggested this was not the case, since this was the more difficult venue, and his performance here was more demanding, a poor performance judged more harshly than a botched lecture in an undergraduate classroom. Actually, he hadn’t even botched the lecture. He’d simply been unable to deliver it. No matter. He would deliver it Thursday. For the experience he was richer by one story, not poorer
.

Except that when Thursday arrived and my father returned to class and took roll, he felt, as soon as his voice fell on the last syllable of Miss Wainwright’s name, the blind panic descend, and once again the words and letters began to rearrange themselves playfully on the page before him. Abandoning his lecture notes, he returned to the roster of his students’ names. There, moments before, the letters had made sense, but now these too were scrambled. He knew that the last name in the column was the name of Miss Wainwright, and with difficulty he located the bottom of the column. Did these letters spell
Wainwright?
How were you supposed to tell? He looked up and located Miss Wainwright without difficulty. He studied her nose first, then an ear. This last thing—this ear—was it too a letter of the alphabet? He couldn’t remember. If you put it together with
a nose, did it make a word? Did it spell
Wainwright?
Couldn’t be. In that case every student in the class would be named Wainwright. It was all too much. He felt his knees buckle, and he had to be helped from the lectern to an empty chair next to Miss Wainwright. He couldn’t stop looking at her nose. “Wainwright,” he cooed at it
.

After this second occurrence, his affliction was no joke. My father wrote out all his lectures in advance and came to class prepared to deliver them, but once he’d read the roll, the same thing happened, and when it did he turned the lectern over to his research assistant, who then read the lecture while my father waited in the hall, sick with fear and humiliation. Out there by the door he could hear the manner in which the lecture was read, the vacillating timbre and skewed emphasis of the words as they came out of his assistant’s throat, and he understood more poignantly than ever before the difference between delivering information and teaching. Worse, separated from his authoritative personality, his observations—even the ones he was most proud of—seemed not … terribly profound
.

This circumstance could not go on, and he knew it. He’d have to resign. He’d have to explain the whole humiliating mess to the dean. The worst part of it was that he’d be able to. He had no trouble talking to deans. It was students he couldn’t talk to
.

This continued through the rest of September and most of October, until one day my father made a discovery that astonished him. Entering the classroom from the hallway, he started talking. Actually, he started
in
the hallway, where things always made sense. He began his sentence out there with his hand on the doorknob, then just continued as he entered. The class was on Dickens, a writer my father particularly despised for his sentimentality and lack of dramatic subtlety, and never did a scholar lay more complete waste to a dead writer than my father to Charles Dickens that day. Never was intellectual contempt more coolly disguised behind a thin veneer of urbane wit than that afternoon. As he talked, my father gained confidence from his own strong voice. He had given the same lecture before, but never like this. In a fit of unplanned dramatic ecstasy, he read Jo’s death scene from
Bleak House
to such devastating comic effect that by the time he’d finished the entire class was on the floor. Then they got up off the floor and gave him a standing ovation
. This
was what they’d paid their money for. Finally, they felt themselves to be in the presence of greatness, as they slammed
Bleak House
shut with contempt
.

News that my father had at last spoken in the classroom and received a standing ovation swept through the department, whose patience with him, truth be told, was beginning to wear a little thin. They’d hired what they imagined to be a cleanup hitter, only to discover that he lacked even the warning-track power of all their other hitters. Why hadn’t somebody demanded a physical? It was one thing to be an uninspiring teacher, even a downright piss poor teacher, but you couldn’t be a mute, even if you were William Henry Devereaux, Sr
.

A few members of the department were secretly disappointed to learn that their distinguished colleague had hit the long ball at last, and envious too, because the Dickens lecture was being discussed everywhere, as if it were the only one that mattered, as if no one else had given an important lecture at Columbia in the last decade. And they were disappointed as well that they would no longer be able to raise a skeptical eyebrow at each other when my father appeared in the office to gather his mail. (My father required two large boxes to accommodate the volume of correspondence he received from readers and other scholars seeking his advice.) You could tell just by observing my father’s stride that William Henry Devereaux, Sr., was back. After the Dickens lecture he looked like a new man. He looked like a man who’d just gotten laid by twins
.

His altered appearance notwithstanding, my father was not convinced his trials were over, and the next class after the famous
Bleak House
lecture proved they weren’t. Halfway through the roll call he felt the now familiar creeping dread coming on, and so he excused himself in the middle of the
M’
s, went outside into the hall, and spoke the first few words of his lecture out there, reentering when he had made his beginning. Today’s lecture was on
David Copperfield.
Out in the hall, his hand on the knob, my father said, “Dickens didn’t care, you see …,” and then he turned the knob and reentered the classroom. “… about the working conditions of the poor. David Copperfield doesn’t object to children working in dark, squalid, unhealthy factories. What seems wrong to David is that such a situation should befall himself, a bright, sensitive child. Dickens’s hero was no crusader after social justice, and neither was his creator, though he didn’t object when he was confused with such crusaders.” And he was off. My father focused on a point midway up the tall seminar-room windows, considerably above the heads of even his tallest students, trusting that, from where they were sitting, he would appear to
be looking not so much “up” as “back,” into nineteenth-century London. From the depths of the blacking factory where David Copperfield was employed, my father could hardly be expected to notice a twentieth-century hand raised in question or objection
.