It was probably too late, even in a university town teeming with academic labor, to hire someone new to teach early American lit (all those Puritans). American Romanticism might be easier to cover.
Listening to Maureen’s sibilant breathing and watching the dawn grow more certain at the window across the room, Stall resolved to tell Amos Harding that he would cover Leaf’s research methodologies class for the remaining two weeks of the summer term. There were only five students in the class. Research Meth, as it was called, was a required course and a thing of withering boredom both to teach and to take. The students who came for the summer term were often tedious themselves: zealots who had gone without the rest and adventure of a vacation before the rigors of grad school, hard-drivers who thought the summer course would put them a few steps ahead of students who arrived in the fall.
Stall had taught the course as a newcomer ten years ago and had considered it a waste of time. Students should either know research methods from their undergraduate studies or should learn them double-time as they grappled with real courses such as the ones he taught in modern British and American poetry and fiction. As he lay watching the shapes of his bedroom resolve themselves out of darkness, a sudden image of Jack Leaf’s hands with traces of white chalk dust on them came to Stall. He did not want to visit the classroom where five students would ask him what had happened to Professor Leaf, but he had to do it.
Stall slipped from the bed as quietly as he could, showered with the bathroom door closed, and went downstairs to make himself a cup of coffee. Maureen was letting their daughter sleep late these last few days of summer. Soon enough they’d all be awakened at six o’clock by the crashing sounds of Corey readying for school. There was no sleeping after Corey’s first footfalls on her bedroom floor, but Stall wouldn’t mind the early mornings. He’d get to his office a good hour before anyone else entered the English building and work on his article about Graham Greene’s religious conversion. He was publishing articles one by one and planning to collect them into a not-so-slim volume. A collection wouldn’t count as a book to the most stringent of his colleagues, but it, and his administrative skills, and the good opinion of Amos Harding, might be enough to get Stall the chairmanship when Harding retired. And then what?
Stall had not thought much about what came the day after he occupied the old leather chair behind the big Victorian pedestal desk in Amos Harding’s office. A good life, he hoped, and a long one. More of his own research and writing—without the pressure of vying for promotion. A chance to demonstrate his leadership skills and his vision for the future of the department. That vision had not yet come into sharp focus, but no matter. As times changed, the department would change naturally with them.
Stall stood at the kitchen sink drinking his coffee and looking at the backyard. The bird feeder, placid in the morning cool, needed cleaning. Perhaps, as chairman, he’d be able to afford a yardman. Corey entered, bleary but cheerful, and began to make herself a breakfast of toast and peanut butter. “Daddy, can I go to Jeannie’s house?” Jeannie Mears was the daughter of the sociologist who lived down the block.
“Sure, honey. Drink some milk.”
Toast in hand, Corey headed for the door. Her sneakered footsteps were receding down the driveway when Stall realized that she had not given him his ritual peck on the cheek. The peck had gone away with the advent of the “training brassiere,” which gave Stall what his grandfather had called “the fantods” every time he hugged his daughter. Not that she let him hug her much anymore. She was moving into that terrain where Daddy’s best use was as an ally against Mother, who, as the other woman in the house, had become a blood enemy. Stall had heard about this, seen some of it. He hoped the Stall family version of the old story would be mild.
He waited a while for Maureen to come down, picturing the look on her face, the one they called Hangover Hell, as she groped her way into the kitchen, her nose pulling her forward, homing in on the aroma of coffee. She did not come down, so Stall went up. He wanted to talk to her before he went to President Connor’s office in Tigert Hall, a place he had visited only once, when the president’s secretary, Mrs. Braithwaite, a miraculous typist, had done some work for him. He had paid her, received from her immaculate hand the manila envelope holding his modest contribution to American Letters, and had watched her type for a few moments before leaving. Never had fingers moved so fast (literally a blur) and never with fewer mistakes. And she did it all with the serenity of a nun at vespers. The look on her face was not concentration and it was far from effort, it was beatitude.
But Stall feared the president’s office as any young professor would, and especially he feared Amos Harding’s words, among other things. What, besides the death of Jack Leaf, could President Connor want to talk to Tom Stall about? Once, a friend of Stall’s father had asked Stall why he wanted to be a professor. Without thinking much about it, the young Stall, weary from his service in the European Theater of War, had said, “So I don’t have to be a salesman.” College presidents were, above all else, salesmen, and this was another reason to fear the administration building. It was the House of Sales. Stall thought of the English Department as the House of Examined Lives.
So Stall wanted to talk to his wife before he went to school. He wanted, he supposed in some vague way, her reassurance, her approval. He wanted her to say, if not by word, then by look or touch, You’ll do fine. You are more than up to this.
He found Maureen leaning on the bathroom sink for what looked like actual support. She regarded him from sunken, shrouded eyes and said, “I’ll never drink again.” It was one of their best old jokes, but this time, he could see, she meant it. He knew that she would drink again (he certainly hoped so; he’d rather not do it alone), but he could see that for now this declaration was the only truth she knew. He went to stand behind her and massage her shoulders. She said only, “Mmmmm.”
Stall said, “Is that good or . . . ?”
“Or,” she said, and so he stopped, though his hands departed her flesh reluctantly.
He had some time, so he contented himself, as he often did, with watching her do what in Victorian novels was called her toilette. She brushed her teeth as though even they hurt, and then let her robe drop to the floor around her ankles. On her way to the shower, she stepped on it. Stall watched her legs, especially her ankles, which were slender and at the same time strong. The ankles of a field hockey star. He loved her ankles. She slowly drew the shower curtain shut, Stall supposed, to make as little of its brutal, rattling noise as possible. Then, modestly, she tossed her panties out through the small aperture between the curtain and the wall.
Stall loved this too, but with complications. Maureen was no more modest than most women of her generation, but she was plenty modest. Even in their thirteenth year of marriage, Stall had to ask her if he could look at her. It went like this:
“May I look at you?”
“Well, of course, dear.” A look of concern for the state of his intellect, if not his sanity.
“No, I mean look at you.”
“You mean, without my . . . ? You mean naked?”
“Sure. That’s what I mean.”
“Oh,” a little laugh, a little giddy, “you’ve done that plenty of times.” And sometimes a somewhat lurid wink.
“No, I mean now. May I look at you now? May I see you naked?” This was the gauntlet thrown. There was no ambiguity left here, at least none that Stall could see. They had entered the land of a simple yes or no.
But Maureen could take the conversation from this simple point to any number of complicated places. She could say, “I don’t like the way I look.” (One of her best.) This had the effect of enlisting
