The Bookman's Tale (7 page)

The first I heard of Tuckwell's trip to the Washington people was in a note from my old student. They liked him; rather more than like him, were impressed. Tuckwell had mentioned me, and X of course, but said he had come down on his own; hadn't consulted anybody. Face-to-face was best, he said. They could see him, and also he could see them—good-natured about it, easy, but meaning it too. He wanted to know about housing and my friend drove him round in his neighborhood. Tuckwell said there would be three of them, one about two feet long if they hired him in the fall. Very pleasant guy; they liked him. The Foundation had come through very handsomely with a grant, as my friend put it, “to defray costs 1 Ph.D. in Anthropology”; they were meeting in a week or so to go through the applications and make a choice.

My friend thought it would be a good idea if Tuckwell met “the Chief” (and “the Chief” met Tuckwell) but he was out of town until the next day. So Tuckwell spent the night, my friend put him up, Tuckwell phoning home to Meg, then phoning the lab and leaving word with Paula to tell Dr. X he would be absent the next morning but would be on hand early in the afternoon—confident, but conscientious too (and insisting on paying for the calls, nothing much, a dollar to two).

Then X gets the message and calls Donna from the lab that he will be detained at the office and not to hold dinner for him, he will get a snack at the cafeteria. And don't wait up for him; he couldn't tell how long this might go on. Then he calls Meg, asks to speak to Oscar, is told Oscar is in Washington, and asks Meg if he may stop in for a minute on his way home to leave some notes for Oscar. “But certainly. How thoughtful of you!” says little wife to husband's boss.

And, “Certainly, oh what a nice idea!” when he finishes his drink and proposes “driving out for a bite” at a new place one of his people has told him of.

Incidentally, he laid all this before me later on the plane to Georgia, really upset and finding me, I suppose, perhaps the only one knowing everybody concerned. I listened, all ears as many little details fell into the blank spaces in what I already knew, or guessed. He wanted to talk, needed to, might have gone to a shrink if as a scientist he hadn't been contemptuous. And he probably felt, too, that I would understand, sensing, I believe, my own down-the-years love—not quite love, of course, just a seedling—for the fresh, smooth-cheeked, quickly smiling Mrs. Tuckwell, Meg (a teetering smile, as if waiting).—But talking to me came later. Our paths didn't usually cross.

It doesn't take much imagination to see the attraction, Meg half his age (or less) wanting to please the boss to further husband's career, rather flattered too by the old man's attention to her as individual, possibly concerned in her own mind that her newly started pregnancy might spoil her appeal, not aware, I should say, that biology had more than taken care of that by toning her cheeks and hair and body the way a musician perfects the pitch of his violin before a recital. She could never have looked better.

For him there were other angles too, as he admitted later (hurrying over them). He had put this and that together and come out with Donna, turning forty, handsome as ever in his eyes, or more so, but wanting reassurance from someone besides him, wanting some fresher proof of her appeal than his fifteen-year-old attentions. Not the first time he had ticked off such guesses, her forays usually leading to jealousy on his part and after a while ending in renewed devotion (possibly supplemented by inherent surprises in the forays themselves), and back to forbearance and a not-intolerable makeshift ecstasy. He had even been half prepared to find she wasn't home when he phoned from the lab, had gone to Washington with Tuckwell; ridiculous of course but jealousy paints with a nonobjective brush. He was not at all prepared, the next time Tuckwell's name came up between them, to find she was indignant: “He is annoying me, this young man. Can you imagine!”

X making light of it with, “Well, after all, baby, you're quite a temptation, you know.”

She said, Thank you, but she hadn't descended to high-school dropouts yet, and he shouted, “Dropout!” and they both laughed—the clouds circling round and away.

He didn't quite believe her; she was blowing up something insignificant, misinterpreting something. But he did believe there might have been something to blow up, to misinterpret, and it changed the way he felt about Meg, or not the way he felt but the way he might express it. If the boy had the nerve, the self-confidence, to “annoy” X's wife then X would have the nerve to do the same to the boy's (not that he hadn't thought of it before—dreamed of it).

But of course it came to nothing, except that it created a sort of frosty coating over the mentor-student relationship with Tuckwell—husband and obstacle to X's interest in Meg (which grew stronger against the impediment), and also an object of jealousy because of what X believed was Donna's unconscious (or not unconscious?) attraction to the “dropout.”

Anyway, off again to the West Coast, taking Donna with him this time, and during the week he was away Tuckwell got the job, phoning me in his exuberance. They had just called him with the news: formal papers in the mail, sign, two witnesses, notary, return one copy, send photocopy of the dissertation registered mail as soon as confirmed.

Then he and Meg to Washington to find accomodations, finding something—McLean, I believe—taking it on a three-year lease for occupancy immediately after his appearance before the Board; back to the University and coming to my office, both of them, to thank me for my help, I trying to explain I had done nothing, but getting a bottle out of a bottom drawer and pouring us all a congratulatory glass. In another week he had turned in his dissertation, packed up and left; I stopped by their apartment as they were phoning for a taxi. When I offered to shake hands with Meg she flung her arms round my neck and kissed me on the mouth. I remember the feel of her lips.

Sarah-Wesley said, “You loved the woman yourself, you rascal,” the Doctor lifting his hand in a gesture that might have been a mild denial or just a signal he hadn't finished yet, Ray mumbling something trivial while his thoughts adjusted not so much to the doctor's being in love with Meg, obvious enough, but to the possibility the doctor and “colleague” were one and the same—the mate with elastic strides tailored to fit the movement of the deck like a circus performer on his bouncing wire, ignoring the passengers as usual (as if it were Rule One in his Service Manual), taking the companionway up to the bridge two steps at a time, the cat trailing like a dinghy. In love with Meg at the time and thought he still was, the idea giving Ray a shock of recognition like passing someone on the street who reminds you of someone else, of yourself indeed, yourself distorted in the Fun-House mirror; of himself being in love with Claudia once and thinking he still was, her voice coming through her letters, “They mowed the wheat below us yesterday, what a glorious smell!”—The Doctor clarifying his lifted hand with, “That's not quite all of it.”

(T
HE
D
OCTOR'S
C
OLLEAGUE'S
T
ALE—CONCL
.)

The baby was born, a boy, in McLean a week after they settled in, the move itself, new friends, new surroundings and all that helping to bring it on I'd say, let the gynecologists smile. Everything fine, except certification hadn't come through; he had taken the two five-hour finals and the two-hour oral, handed in his dissertation and was ready to come up any day at X's notification for the final public oral. After another week he wrote X a polite note: he didn't want to seem impatient, he knew such things took time, but the people down there had asked him again and it was a little embarrassing. They had taken him on the strength of it and were getting a little uneasy.

When he got no answer in ten days he told Meg he was going up there and try to hurry it up. She suggested phoning Dr. X; “So much easier, honey. And cheaper!” He said, Seeing his face was as important as hearing his voice; nevertheless he phoned.

But Dr. X was “not in the office this morning.” “Is this Paula?”

“Yes it is, Dr. Tuckwell.”

“Paula, please ask him to call me tonight after six,” looking down at their new number and giving it to her. She said she was sorry but they didn't expect him back until Monday, he was on the West Coast. “Well, ask him to call me as soon as he gets back. Important, Paula.”

But he didn't call, and when Tuckwell reached him on the phone Monday afternoon he said only, Such things took time you know, tell those people down there to keep their pants on. “There's possibly one little snag, Lieutenant.”

“Snag!”

“I can't tell you any more right now—”

“What do you mean, snag?”

“I'll call you in a day or two when I know something. Do I have your number? Yes, Paula says we have.”

But the “people down there” had got the grant on the basis of the Ph.D. and they phoned him—the Chief's assistant did—and most courteously asked about it. They needed some credentials to show the Foundation office; would really like to provide them with a copy of the certificate, “just as a matter of form. Let us have it as soon as you can, Doctor, it's getting a little awkward for us.”

The rest of it seemed to happen all at once, though of course it took hours, took all of a beautiful October Thursday—the early call from X, “Some not-good news, old fellow. Looks like a guy at Berkeley beat you to it,” waiting a minute, getting only a dead silence and going on, “same problem, same theory, practically the same demonstration. Happens all the time, of course. Two people, miles apart, never heard of each other, pop up one day with the same idea. Happens all the time. Darwin and What's-his-name, you remember—”

“You mean—”

“Trouble is the
Journal
's publishing this guy's paper in the next—”

“You mean I don't get my Doctor's?”

“Not at all, Oscar. You just don't' get it on the basis of this dissertation—”

“I just start all over again!”

“It's a lot simpler the second go-round, Oscar—”

“Wait a minute! Who is this guy? You know this guy?”

“Not really. No.”

“Isn't Berkeley your school?”

“Now wait a minute yourself, Oscar—”

“You didn't steer him on to my idea?”

“Now hold on, Lieutenant!”

“Nobody else knew, I haven't told a living soul—”

“These things happen, I tell you. Happen all the time—”

“You gave him my idea—”

“You're insane!” And the line went dead.

X was crossing the yard to his car when Tuckwell tramped through a bed of late flowers at a corner of the house, bareheaded, unshaved, rumpled collar, service pistol heavy in his hand. X drew back rigid against the side of the car, so surprised he couldn't find a directive of any sort, his mind like a jostled tray of tools; should he speak, say something, just to break the silence? caution the boy, warn him? Beg him? No words ready that seemed to fit, and no physical movement, no way open to escape with the car door against his back, a thought taking shape in his head that any move to duck and run, or even any spoken words would be enough to break some delicate balance in the air between them, trip some spring, all the choices seeming to cancel one another and leave him standing there, chest square to the front, staring at the pale young man ten feet away, and continuing to stare without moving, unable to move, as the young man put the pistol muzzle in his mouth like a fat cigar and pushed the trigger with his thumb.

“You mean this Professor X got jealous and—”

I told him there was no reason he should go to Georgia for the funeral—he was badly shaken—but he wouldn't listen, and I went with him, just the two of us. We kept out of the way, stood off among the trees, the oleanders, some white camellias, didn't speak to anybody, sign any book. Saw Meg from a distance, blank, dazed as if a bright light had flashed into her eyes; didn't speak to her (she wouldn't have known it if we had), flew back that afternoon.

“You mean this Professor—”

“I've told you all I know—except she married again, an Englishman trading in sugar with a plantation in Barbados. One reason I agreed to make the talks at the College. She'll be surprised. She doesn't know I'm coming.”

Ray heard himself exclaim in not much more than a whisper to himself, “Doesn't know you're coming? She'll hear about it through the College.”

“Not likely. But even if she does?—Oh, I won't just walk in the door. I'll ask here and there, size up the situation. If I decide I'm not intruding, I'd like to see her. It's been twenty years, more than twenty. I don't like to add it up.”

Ray said, “She won't be the woman you remember,” as if speaking into a mirror, giving Geltstein (and himself) an excuse for changing his mind, but the Doctor only said, “Even so?” and after a pause, “A later bud on the same stem?” smiling a little to dilute the sentimentality then going on that he once knew a man who said he told a woman he loved her more than when she was beautiful. “She was indignant. He said if she had had a frying pan he would have been a dead duck. Beauty matters more than love—to some of them.…”

Voice fading out for Ray under the temptation of recalling to the Doctor his cautionary “what you find is not what you were searching for,” but changing his mind at realizing it might apply to himself as well: two men each looking for a woman he had loved.—Or was he looking for the man who had loved her?

In any case, the Doctor's planning to see Meg seemed to strengthen Ray's weakening resolve to seek out Claudia. If the Doctor was willing to chance it, determined to, why not Ray? Twenty years, for the Doctor? Closer to thirty for himself—since the train and the pulsing brakes and the door shutting, the snap of the latch saying, “End,” like a voice. And close to two since “
Walter Motlow, in Afghanistan
” and wondering through a restless night's half-sleep after seeing it if the news might be excuse enough for writing her, breaking the long silence. And waking to realize he couldn't write her: “
Claudia Baird of Austin, Texas
” didn't mean she was living there now; and even if she were he had no mailing address.