Green frowned (and there again was that wonderful furrowed brow) and seemed to think hard about the bad news. “Yes,” she said, “I heard. I didn’t know Professor Leaf.”
Maybe this was why Stall had mentioned the death. Maybe he wanted to talk about it with someone, and maybe a stranger was the right person. Someone who knew nothing about Jack Leaf. He found that he didn’t know what to say about Jack Leaf. Leaf seemed . . . was the phrase that kept coming to him, not Leaf was. Jack Leaf was the kind of man who forced you to interpret. Made you speculate. You kept thinking, Who is this guy? Stall had to say something.
“I didn’t know him well. He was kind of private, if you know what I mean. I liked him, though.”
Professor Green’s voice was low and shy when she said, “I heard about what you . . . did for him.”
She meant, of course, that Stall had sacrificed a sport coat to the privacy of a dead man. Historians had recorded that when Caesar was stabbed twenty-three times in the Senate by men he had considered friends, his last act before dying was to pull his toga over his face. “Yeah, I . . .” was all Stall could think to say.
“Well, it was good of you, Tom. A kind thing.”
It was the first time she had used his first name.
Stall thought about Jack Leaf. “Jack was what you might call dapper. He liked good clothes, and he wore them well. None of that professorial shabby gentility for Jack. He wasn’t a dandy or anything, but he didn’t go out in public looking casual.”
“What did that mean, do you think?” Sophie Green folded her arms across her bosom.
“I don’t know.” Stall looked out over her head at the dark gloom of the ancient water oaks, trees that had been here since the foundation of the building was laid in 1922. “I don’t know, but I always had the feeling he was back there behind the clothes, the manners, the easy bonhomie . . . you know, watching. Looking out at the world very carefully, very . . .” Stall couldn’t complete the thought, but he was certain now that the word mysterious suited Jack Leaf. Stall knew that war removed men from their contemporaries who had not fought. In important and sometimes unfortunate ways it set them apart, and perhaps that remove was part of what defined Jack Leaf, but that distance was not all of it. There was more to the mystery. Stall glanced at his watch. Christ, it was almost nine o’clock, and it was a five-minute walk to the administration building. “Whoops,” he said, “I’ve got to go. Got a meeting,” and he turned for the door.
She was behind him in the hallway. “This is for you,” she said.
Stall skidded to a stop and took the envelope from her hand. She smiled when he looked into her eyes, and then he was hurrying again.
FIVE
Stall burst through the door of the presidential suite where legendary Margaret Braithwaite, Typist Immaculata, sat doing what she did best. The entire university knew that Margaret Braithwaite ran a lucrative business out of the president’s office while also catering to the great man’s every need. It was remarkable, Stall thought, and a testament to the times that she could type whole dissertations for grad students and still manage the schedule of a university president. Either the president was not busy enough, or Margaret Braithwaite was the equal of any three mortal women. Stall halted on the carpet in front of her desk, pulling at the collar Maureen had ironed for him. It was drenched with the sweat of his walk from Anderson to Tigert Hall. Mrs. Braithwaite finished a paragraph, her Olivetti making a sound like the German machine gun so feared by the Allies—a ripping sound rather than that of individual explosions, however close together. The German gun had fired an unheard of 1,200 rounds per minute. Unfortunately, Stall had heard the sound.
Compassionately, Mrs. Braithwaite charged for typing on a sliding scale. Grad students, the poorest of the poor, received her services for a mere fifty cents per page. It was said that she occasionally gave sage advice to the writers she typed. (“If I were you, I’d check that reference to Reinhold Niebuhr on page 213.”) The manila envelope passed into your sweating hands and a smile sent you out the door. And Stall had never heard anyone say that her interventions were unwelcome.
He looked at his watch.
Without looking up, Mrs. B. said, “He’s stuck in a meeting. He’ll be here soon.”
Stall thought this probably meant that the president was unable to free himself from a grudge round of golf—which, come to think of it, could also be an important meeting with a regent. It was all of a piece, and in Gainesville, President Connor was almost as well respected as his secretary. Like most Southern university presidents, he was more man of action than scholar. His trajectory had been lawyer, soldier (the Great War), businessman, and university president. The soldier had earned the Croix de Guerre at Belleau Wood. The businessman had prospered with the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad. But President Thomas Connor was known best by rank-and-file Floridians for having been an amateur boxer of some renown: he’d won a Golden Gloves title in the welterweight division. Gas station attendants and grove workers knew him as the young man who had passed the bar examination and lasted ten rounds with Benny Leonard in the same week. Connor had lost the exhibition match but had persisted. Neither fighter’s knee had touched the canvas. Inevitably, when the newspapers covered Connor’s frequent trips to Tallahassee to finagle dollars for the growing university, the headline was something like: “Connor Boxes Pols for Education Lucre.”
Stall took the chair that Margaret Braithwaite offered with a nod of her head, listened uncomfortably to the burring sound of the typewriter as she pushed the machine to the limit of its ability to whack words onto paper while avoiding an apocalyptic snarl of steel and inky ribbon, and examined the framed pictures of James Connor on the walls: a young Connor kissing a boxing trophy, a mature Connor shaking hands with Senator Lyndon Baines Johnson, the same grip with Senator Spessard Holland, Connor breaking ground for a new building with a golden shovel in his hand and a steel hard hat raked across his brow, and Connor standing beside a railroad track with his arm slung over the shoulder of Charley Johns, who had risen from railroad conductor on a stretch of track near Starke to president of the Florida Senate. It all fits, thought Stall, who was an English professor but no snob. Stall had fled from the House of War to the House of Examined Lives, but he knew that money flowed only in one direction. It was the way of the world, and better to embrace the world as it was than to worry too much about changing it. Stall was proud to have a man like Connor as his president, a man who had rolled up his sleeves and stalked into the arena, as Teddy Roosevelt had famously said, there to be bloodied but unbowed, his face marred by dust and sweat, and from thence to return to the groves of academe with cash in one fist and hard-won worldly knowledge in the other.
While he waited, Stall opened the envelope Sophie Green had given him.
Dear Professor Stall,
I hope you won’t think me too forward if I offer to teach one of Professor Leaf’s courses in American literature. I wrote my master’s thesis on The Leatherstocking Tales, and, though I later moved on to specialize in Chaucer (a lot of distance between those two!), I remember a good bit about American Romanticism, and I will certainly bone up on it if you repose faith in me to take over the course. I’m new and untried, I know, but I want to be helpful if I can in this sad time.
Sincerely,
Sophie Green
Stall watched Mrs. Flying Fingers exercise her calling and considered proposing to Amos Harding that Sophie Green take over Jack Leaf’s American Romanticism
