The Winter After This Summer Read online

  “Why, God damn it,” said Ted Chandler, who learned hard but never forgot a good line, “Ben was a big man every which way.”

  “Leave Ben out of this,” Claiborne said to them. “If Egan’s got the idea Ben was his private property, that’s his business. It won’t be the first time he was wrong about something.”

  “It’s too bad Stu Clark didn’t knock your brains put down there,” Ingle the Lion-hearted told me. “Those Dekes should have taken you apart piece by piece, the way you went looking for trouble. We saw what happened.”

  “That’s right, Egan,” said Olin Garret. “You plan to fight your way through every house around here before you go? What kind of name do you want to give us?”

  I said slowly and distinctly, “Ben thought every one of you was a joke. And football. And the University. But most of all he thought you and your Mickey Mouse Club and everything you ever said and did was one great big joke. That’s what made him a big man. And that’s what you can carve on a paddle and hang over the fireplace. Ben was a big man because he thought you were all a load of crap. And when he said it to your faces and you laughed along with him, he knew he was right. Just the way I knew it and Claiborne here knew it, too, if he’s as smart as I think he is.”

  They looked as if they had been struck to stone. Only Claiborne said to me, “I didn’t ask you to be my spokesman, Egan. I don’t need anyone for that, but if I did, you’d be the last one I’d call on.”

  Ted Chandler struggled out of his stupefaction. “Why, God damn it, Egan, how would you like to go down on the grass with me and say that whole thing over again? I’m asking you how you’d like it.”

  “I’d like it,” I said, and picked up the suitcase. “But if we went down on that grass, Chandler, I’d kill you, and then what would your girl friend say? The last time I saw you two together she needed every bit of you.”

  “Why, God damn it—!” said Chandler, but he didn’t struggle very hard to get away from Ingle’s restraining hands, and Ingle, it might be said, was just about half Chandler’s size. I went down the steps of the portico, and this time only Claiborne followed me. He walked silently by my side, stopping once to snap off the head of a dandelion. As we reached the road he said abruptly, “They’re sending the body home by train tomorrow. The services are going to be held on Wednesday.”

  “I know.”

  “Are you going to be there?”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t think I am.”

  Claiborne thought that over and then nodded. “That’s probably just as well. The whole house will be there—we’re having the libation ceremony afterward—and I wondered—”

  “I’ve been kicked out of the house, remember? And you don’t have to wonder. I won’t be there to bother anybody.”

  “Yes,” said Claiborne. “And in case you hadn’t heard about it, I’m driving the Gennaros up to Maartenskill tomorrow morning. Mr. Gennaro’s in no shape to drive, of course, so I offered to do it. Representing the house, naturally.”

  Representing himself, he meant. And since there was no way of leaving Papa and Mama Gennaro out of the picture he’d put them in the back seat while Mia sat in the front with him. And, when she became sleepy as she always did on a long drive, she would put her head on his shoulder. Even having Papa and Mama in the back looking at her wouldn’t stop her from doing that. I had taken the family on long drives several times. I knew my Mia.

  “There’s a detour a few miles past Kingston,” I said. “Turn off on to thirty-two there, and it’ll take you right into Maartenskill.”

  “I’ll do that.” He stopped at the edge of the road, and I stopped, too, because it was evident that he still had something to say to me. He said it at last. “You know, Egan, that remark you made about the way I felt—I mean, about feeling that the house somehow sold out to Ben’s glory—well, I want you to know you’re wrong about it. Completely wrong.”

  “The hell I am,” I said, and left him there.

  THREE

  Faculty Row started beyond the stadium at the far end of the campus, and Dr. McGhan’s house was near the end of Faculty Row, a long walk from Iobacchoi into the sunset. Winter or summer, it was easy to pick out McGhan’s house from any on the street. In the winter it was the only one there with unshoveled snow always covering its sidewalk, and in the summer it was the one with the unkempt lawn. Sometimes—either when I felt guilty at having imposed on the McGhans so much, taking up their time, drinking their beer, eating their dinner, or when I was just overcharged with pointless energy—I would take out the lawn mower from their garage and mow the lawn for them. They would thank me for that, but I had the feeling that it never made any difference to them whether the lawn was tended or not.

  When I walked up I could see that no one had bothered to take out the mower since I had last been there two weeks before. There would have been small point to it, anyhow. The older kids, Heather and Maureen, were sitting in the middle of the lawn with pails and shovels, digging holes in it, and Dorothy McGhan was sitting on the top step of the porch with the baby over her shoulder, watching them.

  There were times when I had daydreams about Dorothy, especially during the Christmas season when McGhan was off at a Modern Language Association conference somewhere, or Easter Week when he was out of town at some intercollegiate committee meeting, and Dorothy was left alone with the kids in that big house. I would picture myself dropping in to spend the evening with her, then the hour would grow late, and instead of leaving I would work around to a proposition in an intense but gentlemanly way, and she, wary but interested, would succumb.

  There was a comic element in the daydreams, too. I could imagine everything in a nice orderly progression up to a point, and then the picture would come apart. I could see us walking up the stairs together and going into the bedroom. We would undress in half-darkness, she would be in my arms, those magnificent breasts pressed tight against my chest, we would be on the bed writhing tighter and tighter against each other, and then, damn it, in my fancy I would hear the baby in the next room start to cry. And Enid at a year old had a frantic bellow which was enough to shatter any daydream. Or, still in my mind’s eye, Heather and Maureen decided they needed a glass of water, as they usually did three or four times an evening when I baby-sat for the McGhans. Which all adds up to the weakness of daydreams that are too literal.

  I walked up to the porch, and Dorothy said, “Hello, Danny. Lyle’s inside working. Don’t worry about bothering him; he ought to knock off now, anyhow.”

  “I don’t have much to bother him about,” I said. “I’ve been given my walking papers. I just wanted to say good-bye.”

  “Yes,” said Dorothy placidly. “I know.”

  That was Dorothy. She had met McGhan six years before when he had gone for an operation to the hospital in town where she was a nurse, and a week after he left the hospital they were married. If anyone was surprised by that, or by the way the babies started coming in rapid succession, it wasn’t Dorothy. She was one of those people who naturally and effortlessly live lives of noninvolvement. She was serenely interested in anything which concerned her or went on about her, but that was all. I had known her for three years, and shouldn’t have expected a more emotional response to my own little crisis. But I had expected it. And I felt distinctly wounded when I went into the house.

  I could hear McGhan in his study typing away furiously, and when I pushed open his door he waved a friendly hand at me as a signal that he would be finished right away, and that I was to sit down and wait. It was always something to see McGhan typing. The machine was a small portable, which he banged so hard that it kept skidding away from him, and he would make frequent lunges at it to drag it back into position. When he stopped typing for a moment to read what he had written, he would work the fingers of one hand through his red beard and loudly slap the table in a steady rhythm with the other hand. At the end of each page he would rip the sheet out of the typewriter and fling it on the floor, and, because the ta
ble was a litter of magazines and manuscript pages, he would have to dig through the pile to find a fresh sheet of paper and carbon. It was like watching a cyclone in action to watch him at work, and to be with him when he was in a state of what might be called passivity in anyone else, was like being in the eye of a cyclone with the pressure falling around you.

  The magazines which littered the table and floor were, from what I could see, mostly true-confessionals with lurid covers, which meant that he had already started his summer stint. He had the curious knack of being able to write highly successful true-confessional stories along with the things he occasionally did for Accent and the Kenyon Review and the University Quarterly, and every summer he would turn out ten or twelve confessionals which, he said, kept him out of economic bondage. He and Dorothy weren’t extravagant—they made no effort to keep up appearances as most others did on Faculty Row—but they had no idea how to keep accounts or figure out where the money went, and no intention of doing anything about it. So the anonymous confessional writing for a few weeks every summer came in very handy. Nor did McGhan ever make a secret of it. I think, if anything he was rather proud of it. “Panem et circenses,” he liked to say. “These are what the University thrives on, and where others supply the bread, I supply the circuses.”

  He was, in fact, the most popular instructor in the English Department. He was hot-tempered, dogmatic, sometimes incoherent, and a cruel marker, but always with a well-founded answer to a direct question and always exciting to listen to. So his lectures were jammed, and there were more applications each term for his seminars than places in the room. And the sardonic manner, the red beard and disheveled mop of flaming red hair, the willingness to challenge the status quo, and the unabashed talent for writing torrid confessional stories were all splendid advertisements for him. He had a good deal of the circus about him, all right, but there was substance under it, too.

  When he stopped typing and leaned back in his chair looking at me expectantly I said, “I thought I’d find you in the department office, but they told me you left early.”

  “Yes, I make a point of leaving early once I start posting marks.” He bent over and picked up a glass from the floor. There was nothing left in it but a couple of olives, and he popped these into his mouth and talked around them. “Saves me the trouble of facing anguished students and heartbroken parents. Wives, too, for that matter. That’s something I never had to worry about before the G.I. Bill—the weeping wife cradling her young and telling me that if I didn’t up her husband’s mark a notch, there was a divorce in the offing. Adds an interesting court-of-domestic-relations note to the office, having women crying and babies pissing all over it.” He picked up the glass and spit the two olive pits into it. “God knows how many marriages I saved in my time. Anyhow, I gave you an A. You probably saw it on the bulletin board.”

  “No, I didn’t look at the bulletin board.”

  “So much for my kindly works. Williamson gave you an A too. He told me the Medieval Lit paper you turned in was one of the best he’s seen in a long time. Not that he’s any judge. I think he was surprised that you bothered to turn in any paper at all. Come into the kitchen with me. I need a refill.”

  I followed him into the kitchen. The sink was full of dirty dishes and he put the glass down among them. Then he opened the refrigerator and took out an uncapped milk bottle full to the brim with martinis, and, from force of habit, took out a bottle of beer as well. When I said, “I think I’ll have a martini instead,” he hesitated, then put back the bottle of beer. “Well, considering the occasion—” he said.

  There were no clean glasses on the shelves. McGhan finally took down two coffee cups, poured about an inch into one for me, and a good deal more into the other for himself. He dropped two olives into each, said, “That’s to make it honest,” and took a long drink.

  I heard the screen door slam, and a moment later Dorothy came into the kitchen with Enid under her arm flailing away as if she were swimming. Dorothy sat down and put Enid on the floor. “I could use one of those,” she said.

  “I thought you’d hear the refrigerator door,” McGhan said. He took out another cup, poured her a drink, and then found there were no more olives in the jar. He fished one out of his own cup with his fingers and put it into hers.

  “I hope your fingers are clean,” Dorothy said when he handed her the cup.

  “Cleaner than this kitchen is,” McGhan said. “Jesus, look at it. Must you leave those dishes like that? It’s disgusting.”

  “Isn’t it,” said Dorothy calmly. She looked at me. “You might as well stay for dinner. I suppose you’re taking the train tonight, but you have plenty of time.”

  “Plenty of time,” I said, and took a drink of the martini. It was strong enough to curl your tongue.

  “Stop acting like a kid,” McGhan said. “There are other colleges in the country besides this one. Some of them even have good-looking women in them. You have no idea how much it adds to a dull lecture to sit in back of a room with your hand up someone’s skirt while you listen to it. Think of that and take courage.”

  The first few times I had ever heard him talk this way in front of Dorothy or whatever company happened to be in the house I had been made uncomfortable by it. I was eighteen then and had some remarkably priggish notions about my elders and betters. Three years of McGhan had pretty well cleared them out of my system.

  I said: “News travels fast, doesn’t it? How did you know I was being let out? It happened only a couple of hours ago.”

  “It happened last night,” McGhan said. “A soirée was held at the Dean’s residence after dinner, and, by coincidence, the only ones in attendance were some of your instructors and your faculty advisor. By the time we finished with you, boy, we knew more about you than was decent. You certainly went out with a bang.”

  I downed the rest of my drink in one gulp. “I’m surprised the Iobacchoi team wasn’t there, too. They must have been disappointed at not being invited.”

  “They didn’t have to be,” McGhan said. “We had depositions from Claiborne and Ingle and from some of the firemen and cops who were at the scene of action. But I’ll admit that the evidence they gave was varied and inconclusive, to say the least. What did happen there between you and Claiborne?”

  “What difference does that make now?” I said. “And as far as the evidence goes, it was conclusive enough to get me expelled. You can’t ask for more than that.”

  McGhan snorted. “Hell, you’re not such a simpleton as to think that what happened to Gennaro or what you did to Claiborne was the only thing under consideration, are you? It was simply the last straw on the academic camel’s back. Boy, you’ve been living on conditions here for quite a while now; you’ve been living on borrowed time, and never got around to paying an installment. When you ran wild Saturday night you just naturally went and called the creditor’s attention to you. That’s always a mistake.”

  “I can see it was,” I said.

  “You’re not saying that with the proper humility,” McGhan said. “Consider the facts of life, Mr. Egan. In the last three years you’ve moved from the engineering school to fine arts to the humanities and been plowed under each time. You’ve chalked up a few good grades, but you’ve also got enough incompletes and flunks to cancel them out. There’s a dilettante quality about that kind of record which doesn’t sit well on the faculty stomach. I went to bat for you and so did Williamson, but we were isolated cases. Anyhow, I’m regarded as something of a nut myself, and Williamson is so junior that the Committee on Standings wouldn’t even fart on his opinions. So you see, Mr. Egan, it isn’t always easy to be a dilettante in this cruel world. It might be that you don’t have the knack for it.”

  “Well, you don’t have to rub it in,” Dorothy said, and McGhan poked his beard at her. “Oh, yes, I do,” he said. “Here’s a fine specimen of the high I.Q. type who’s going to be America’s salvation, and I happen to be stinking full of patriotism today.”


  “Of gin,” Dorothy said.

  “No, of patriotism. I reek with it. That painful meeting last night has all my goodness rising to the surface. In fact, I may be well on my way to becoming a son of a bitch manqué. And in that guise I would like to drop indifferentism which is a gross sin, anyhow, and take a position.”

  “On what?” said Dorothy.

  “On our boy here. My affection for him is such that if I myself had a son, God forbid, I can picture him as a small, redheaded Danny. But definitely not the subject of the kind of faculty humor I heard last night.”

  “If it’s faculty humor don’t bother to repeat it,” Dorothy said, and then the screen door at the front of the house squeaked open and slammed shut, and Heather and Maureen came trailing into the kitchen. Heather was five and Maureen three, and while they both had McGhan’s red hair they looked like miniature Dorothys. Curiously enough, Enid, who sat on the floor looking from one to another of us as we talked, was the only one of the kids who had dark hair like Dorothy, and she was the one who looked like McGhan.

  Heather went over to Dorothy and pulled at her skirt. “The ice-cream man is here,” she said. “We want ice cream.”

  “Not now,” Dorothy said, “it’s too near suppertime,” but McGhan said, “Oh, stop with the Dr. Spock bit.” He took some change out of his pocket and held it out toward Heather, who looked at it hungrily and then looked up at Dorothy.

  “It’s all right,” Dorothy said. “Daddy wants you to have ice cream, so go ahead and have it. But remember when you throw up at suppertime do it all over Daddy and not me. He likes it.”

  “I will not throw up,” Heather said indignantly. She took the money from McGhan and left the kitchen with her nose in the air and Maureen tagging along after her. Maureen was always silently tagging after her. The screen door squeaked and slapped shut again.