God!” Maureen’s tone was infinitely weary, but Stall thought she was beginning to see the humor in this. The awful, absurd, but inescapable humor. Jack Leaf had been an underground man. And for some reason, his wife had sprinkled hints about his secret under the nose of the wife of the assistant department chairman. Jack Leaf was a Red Indian, and he was passing. Passing was serious business in the South, and Gainesville, Florida, was definitely the South.
The important thing, the sobering thing (and God knew they needed sobering), was that nobody in an English department in a Southern land-grant university had ever even considered the possibility that a member of the graduate faculty might be an Indian. A Red man named Red Leaf. It would have been like asking yourself if a man with a very dark tan that never faded in winter was a Negro. To the bigoted minds that worked the farms and picked the oranges and pumped the gas out where the kudzu crept daily toward University City, there was not one inch of difference between a Negro and an Indian. Even English professors knew this. To the bigoted mind, Negroes and Indians were one and the same, and they were bad.
Stall had grown up Southern and had rid himself to the best of his ability of the racial and social ideas of his parents and grandparents. He considered himself liberal in both the old and the new senses of the word. Maureen had not grown up Southern. She was from Oberlin, Ohio, a college town, and she counted professors among the men of her family going back generations. Stall had met Maureen Wiggins when he was a grad student at the University of Virginia just after the war, and in the process of choosing each other, they’d had many political discussions. It was Maureen who had vetted Stall. Stall believed that she had chosen the famously conservative Randolph-Macon College (“Randy Mac” to the boys of UVA) as the place to earn her BA in education at least partly so that she could spend four years there as a member of the opposition to all things Southern and especially the doctrine of separate-but-equal. She had made it clear to Stall that their relationship could go no further than casual dating (though they were strongly attracted to each other) unless he made sincere declarations to her of his liberal values. Like most young men his age, and especially young men who had been to war, Stall would have done almost anything to get a coed into bed, but with Maureen, sincerity came at no price. He really did hate everything that was small-minded and bigoted about the South. He had broken forever with some of his relatives over segregation, and in those days, in the certainty of youth, he knew that he would never regret these partings of ways.
The phone rang. It was too late at night for polite phone calling, so Stall knew this ringing could be about only one thing, the death of Jack Leaf. He stood a little unsteadily and said, “I’d better get that.”
Maureen stared at the jangling instrument that hung from the kitchen wall as though it might leap across the room and bite her.
Stall said hello to the world outside this kitchen in his most confident voice.
“Hello, Tom. Amos here. I’m sorry to call you so late at night and with such a sad thing to discuss.” The long-distance line was windy, and Harding sounded as far away as he was.
Amos Harding, chairman of the English Department. Ancient Amos, whose life’s work—studies of the essays of Sir Thomas Browne—was considered by most of the younger graduate faculty so hopelessly out of date that it disqualified Harding as chairman. But Harding hung on, mostly by dint of Southern courtliness and a golfing friendship with Thomas Connor, president of the university. Stall walked a narrow line between Harding, whom honor required him to defend, and the younger faculty, who thought Harding kept the department firmly anchored in the nineteenth century.
“Hello, Chairman Harding.”
“Call me Amos, Tom, especially on a night like this. I’m calling to thank you for stepping into the breach when we needed you today.”
The boy stood on the burning deck, Stall thought, then shook his head. All he had done was give a dead man the decency of a covered face and ask some students the obvious questions.
“Well, thank you, sir . . . Amos. I only did what anyone would have done.”
“Not just anyone, Tom. We both know a situation like that requires grit and judgment. McPhail told me you did well.”
McPhail? A dancing policeman. The standard for decisive action. Before Stall could thank the chairman again, Harding said, “President Connor wants to see you. Tomorrow. Among other things, he wants to thank you for acting as you did.”
Stall’s tired brain selected among other things from the flow of language as a bear would snatch a leaping salmon in its jaws. Sweat broke out on his forehead. Maureen sipped unsteadily and looked at him with concern.
“He’ll see you at nine o’clock. And Tom, come by my office after you finish with the president.”
“Yes sir, of course.”
“Amos, Tom. Call me Amos. You’ve earned it. You may well be my successor, so the two of us ought to know each other better before I shuffle off this mortal coil.”
“Surely, sir, only the coil of the job. Not the, uh . . . I’m sorry, I meant to say Amos.”
A dry chuckle came over the line. “That’s all right, Tom. We’re all a bit rattled today.”
“Amos,” Stall said, “have you spoken to Sarah Leaf?”
Harding sighed. “Yes, Tom. I spoke to her earlier this evening. She’s in a pretty bad way. I sent my wife over to stay with her until other arrangements can be made.”
Stall thought about the appalling awkwardness of Harding’s elderly wife appearing at Sarah Leaf’s door announced but unwanted. Poor Sarah. And then Stall reconsidered, thinking himself the ass his wife had called him twice tonight. Who was he to say what comfort Sarah Leaf might take from the doddering Mrs. Harding? And Stall knew he was getting a glimpse tonight of the greater reach of a chairman’s job, the future that lay ahead of him should Harding choose him as his successor. The job, if Stall got it, would involve more than hiring and promoting, deciding which grad students got stipends and teaching assistantships, chairing meetings, and generally herding a flock of exotic birds. It would mean phone calls like this one late at night, and missions of condolence like that of old Mrs. Harding.
Stall assured Amos Harding that he’d be sitting in President Connor’s outer office at fifteen minutes to nine the next morning. Harding thanked him and they said good night.
Stall finished his drink and lifted Maureen by the elbow. She took a final defiant sip of gin, then set the half-finished third martini on the kitchen counter. As they walked to the stairs, she said, “Maybe we should have called Sarah.”
“Harding called her. He sent his wife over to stay with her.”
“Oh no.”
“I know.”
And with that the Stalls went up to bed.
THREE
In the early hours of morning as he lay next to Maureen’s sweetly breathing warmth, Tom Stall remembered sudden deaths. There had never been a departmental suicide before, but an old professor’s heart had stopped in the jury box at the courthouse downtown, and another had died of a stroke on a fishing boat far out on Newnans Lake, the professor, not so elderly, found slumped over the tiller of his outboard motor. When these things happened, the junior members of the department were asked to take on the burdens of extra classes. Who would take over
