Mr. Laney lived in one of the several apartment complexes in Mountain Brook occupied almost exclusively by “the newly-wed and the nearly dead,” according to the popular expression in town. Unlike most of the newer, quickly and cheaply constructed condominiums and apartment buildings sprouting up all over the city, these structures possessed a certain dignity that came not only from their age but from their stately red brick exteriors and lofty interiors of high ceilings and hardwood floors. They blended in nicely with the houses they often resembled and adjoined in neighborhoods near Crestline, English and Mountain Brook villages. It was the only way to live in Mountain Brook without paying the usual price of Mountain Brook real estate. And it was considered an acceptable location for young couples saving up to purchase their first home or elderly widows no longer interested in maintaining a house. The rents were reasonable and the waiting lists were as long as they were secret. Procuring a place in one of these complexes was mostly a matter of who you were and who you knew, and could be as complicated as getting into the country club.
When Norman Laney had first moved from Pratt City years ago, the only place he could find and afford that wasn’t unbearably barbaric was right off the Red Mountain Expressway, all the way out near Vestavia. Nine months later, Bella Whitmire got lost when she tried to “run something over” to his “house.” When she finally found where he lived, she was appalled and immediately took the necessary steps to find him “a more suitable place to live.” After their trip to Europe that summer, he moved into the apartment building next to Crestline Village where he’d been ever since. The location was mercifully near the school, and not far from the Piggly Wiggly, or “the Pig,” where his mother preferred to shop for her groceries. Over time she made friends with Phyllis, another elderly resident who still had her car and took Norma to “the Pig” nearly every day. The buildings were well maintained and the rent was mysteriously lower than what he’d paid for his first apartment which had none of the charm or convenience of location. Altogether, Norman felt he couldn’t complain about the small size of the rooms or the lack of a second bathroom, especially since his was a corner unit with a bit of extra space that allowed for a separate den as well as living room.
Although some of his students had visited relatives in the building, most had never been inside his own apartment. It was a special privilege for the members of the “Art in the 20th Century” class to be invited there in December for a salon such as Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas might have hosted at 27 Rue de Fleurus. All of them had heard about his place, and believed they knew what to expect from having been in his office, with its unruly clutter of art and books filling every available space on the floor, walls, desk and shelves. However, none of them found they had been quite prepared for what they encountered as soon as they stepped into Mr. Laney’s tiny foyer.
For one thing, the already small apartment was made even smaller by the magnitude of Mr. Laney’s mountainous girth and the voluminous collection of art and books literally covering every inch of space. There seemed to be little room for any other occupant. Heavy gilt frames as well as large unframed canvases jutted out from the walls; vases, sculptures and objets d’art sprouted up from the tables. With Mr. Laney standing in the foyer, beaming widely with the two rosy balls of flesh on either side of his smile, there didn’t seem to be any way for the first wave of students to enter. Apart from the enormity of Mr. Laney in the center of the narrow hallway, there was a huge canvas painted on all sides on the wall to his right, and on his left was a table with a sculpture of a young girl on a swing, with her legs stretched out in front, her hair flying out behind, and her back arched in the childhood ecstasy of soaring through the air. Either you bumped your head on the canvas, had your skin pricked by the girl’s metal feet, or ran smack into the abdominous protrusion of Mr. Laney’s middle. Yet somehow the first four crowded in without mishap to themselves or the contents of the apartment.
“Is she having an orgasm?” said Luke Pendarvis, looking down with amusement at the girl whose feet threatened to jab him in the arm.
“Not the kind you would understand,” retorted Mr. Laney.
“How many kinds are there?” said Luke, with growing amusement, while his three classmates stood scandalized and tried to stifle their laughter and horror. Luke was always pushing it and going too far, but he’d never gone so far as to use the word “orgasm” in the classroom in front of one of their teachers, and they weren’t sure how Mr. Laney would take it in his own home as soon as they’d walked through the door.
“There are many kinds of intellectual and spiritual rapture which you’d know about if you ever came to class or did your work,” said Mr. Laney, with continued good humor.
Luke shrugged while his classmates laughed openly now. “This looks pretty physical to me,” he said, yelling “Ouch!” as the girl’s foot finally got him.
“You must not have been paying attention during Gayle’s lessons on metaphor,” said Mr. Laney, steering these four toward his living room as the slamming of a car door indicated more arrivals.
The twenty students who eventually crowded into Mr. Laney’s apartment for the two o’clock salon all found themselves literally face to face with the collection of art they had so often heard about. Luke made a joke of it, as he made a joke of everything, and asked if this was what Mr. Laney meant when he spoke of intense encounters with art and culture. For emphasis and further laughs, he rubbed his arm where the sculpture had poked him. But there was something undeniably special about being so close to all the pictures that had an immediate impact, visual and otherwise. The apartment seemed all art, and nothing else. With pictures jammed up next to one another so that the frames were actually touching and even threatening to overlap, no wall space was actually visible. And as all the walls were similarly covered, one wall disappeared into another until they all disappeared and there was no sense of walls anywhere in the apartment. Contributing to this effect was the placement of the pictures, which seemed haphazard and inapt at first glance, but proved a clever optical trick. Oils, watercolors, pen and ink drawings, lithographs and guaches were as crazily juxtaposed as the cubist, the abstract, the pictorial and the impressionistic. Ornate, formal frames hung side by side with works that had no frames or prints with metal frames. The hodgepodge arrangement served to showcase each piece by preventing one work from blending into another, and further prevented the walls of solid art from seeming like walls. And as the walls vanished, what had at first seemed like an impossibly tiny apartment was magically transformed into an arena of beauty and light that encouraged the soul to soar like the girl in the sculpture was soaring on her swing.
Mr. Laney’s students got it. Here the lessons he expounded in his classroom were evident all over his apartment, as the art and culture which abounded crowded out everything else to the point of banishing it altogether. They could see what he meant about earthly limitations falling away, and the mind taking flight, powered by art and culture. His whole apartment, like he himself, was a monument to Art and Culture. The way the entire space overflowed with splendors suggested a spirit set free and joyfully transcending its physical boundaries.
When Mr. Laney retreated for a moment into the kitchen, Luke Pendarvis picked up a Venetian Carnivale mask from the table next to him and placed it over his face. Karen Ritchie, who had been invited to capture the occasion for inclusion in the yearbook, snapped a picture and a flashbulb went off. Taking a bow, Luke replaced the mask just as Mr. Laney returned bearing a tray with miniature watercress sandwiches. There was already an extensive spread on the dining room table, most of which, Mr. Laney said, came straight out of Alice’s cookbook.
After Karen took that first picture, something seemed to snap also in the students. The unique spectacle of Mr. Laney’s apartment along with the unique sensation of being treated as his equals had initially confounded them. But here they were, in Mr. Laney’s apartment at last. Half of their senior year was behind them, as were their exams and college applications, and the experiences they had heard about forever were soon to be theirs—graduation, college, adulthood, the freedom to live their own lives on their own terms. As they bit into watercress sandwiches and Alice B. Toklas brownies, they felt they were getting their first taste of these freedoms, of what it felt like to hear the word “orgasm” used in conversation or Mrs. Naughton referred to as “Gayle.” A sudden hilarity seized the group as if Mr. Laney had, after all, spiked the famous brownies with hashish.
“Which one is the Jasper Johns?” asked Luke, looking around and bouncing on his toes while crunching into watercress. He was rarely known to sit down, even in Mrs. Naughton’s class.
Mr. Laney indicated a small, rather unremarkable canvas next to the Picasso drawing. Several of the students went over to inspect it more closely; they had all heard the story of Mr. Laney’s first acquisition from his first trip to New York, made when he was a student at Birmingham-Southern. Jasper Johns was unknown at the time, but as soon as Mr. Laney had spied his work in that Manhattan gallery, he had perceived its quality and immediately pulled out all the money he needed for his week in New York to purchase a small piece. In time his judgment was ratified by the art world, and he took this as a sign that he should always trust his vision and yield to his impulses. He could point to many other now valuable works of art—including a Robert Rauschenberg—as well as his own life’s work as a result.
“How much is it worth now?” asked Malcolm, as everyone laughed at such a typical Malcolm question.
In the classroom, Mr. Laney would normally have reproved Malcolm for approaching art on such commercial terms, but they weren’t in the classroom and Mr. Laney wasn’t really treating them like his students anymore. They were being elevated in more ways than one by being in his apartment, and Mr. Laney responded respectfully to Malcolm’s question.
“If I sold that piece tomorrow,” he said, “I could buy any house I wanted in Mountain Brook.”
Malcolm blinked as if taken by surprise, and an admiration for Mr. Laney he’d never shown before spread visibly across his face. He had always been the most sardonic and skeptical of the 20th Century Art students when Mr. Laney spoke of the value of art. Now he was encountering a kind of value he could appreciate. And the kind of person who knew how to invest, who had the vision that enabled him to buy low and be able to sell high later on was the kind of person he was hoping to become.
“Why don’t you sell then?” asked Malcolm. “If you could buy a house in Mountain Brook?”
The others waited to see if Malcolm had now finally gone too far, just as they feared Luke had earlier.
“Sell my Jasper Johns?” said Mr. Laney, as if no sane person would consider such an act of barbarity. “Why would I sell the work of a great artist just so I could buy a house in Mountain Brook?”
Mr. Laney had not come close to exploding, but was feigning an amused bafflement designed to cast Malcolm’s question in the light of lunacy. Malcolm, however, refused to be deterred.
“Not just so you could buy a house in Mountain Brook,” he explained, as if he too, were talking to an idiot child. “But so you could live in a house. Wouldn’t you rather live in a house instead of an apartment?”
“Not without my Jasper Johns I wouldn’t,” Mr. Laney declared flatly. “Life in a small apartment with my art on the walls is infinitely preferable to life in any house in Mountain Brook without my art on the walls.”
Everyone including Malcolm was impressed into a deep silence. Never before had they contemplated this kind of power in art, to make life in a small apartment better than life in a big house. Their parents would be scandalized, they realized happily.
“Should I take a picture, do you think?” fretted Karen, fiddling with her camera.
“No, you should not, said Mr. Laney emphatically. “Put that thing up and forget about it. That’s not why I invited you.”
Karen looked abashed, as if she’d done something wrong and incurred his displeasure. Dammit, thought Norman. He couldn’t get it right with this child. Here she was becoming more rather than less withdrawn—the opposite of what he’d intended. The college trip hadn’t helped much either on that score. And naturally, the early decision rejection from Harvard hadn’t helped at all. Still, this didn’t entirely explain why she didn’t feel she could join the group she’d been going to school with for years. It was obviously not just because she wasn’t in 20th Century Art. Everyone had always respected Karen—who would most likely be their valedictorian—and since her mother’s death had gone out of their way to be kind to her. Still, she hung back as if she didn’t think herself good enough, as if she didn’t want to impose her inadequacies on anyone else.
Ginger Cooley was gesticulating theatrically as usual in the corner by the Frohock where the other Frenchies had gathered along with Malcolm Fielding and Glenn Daniels. Some story about running out of gas the day before the National French Exam when she’d taken a vow to speak only French during the twenty-four hours before the test. Fortunately the car had stalled just outside of Mountain Brook village, so she had been able to walk to the Shell station, but unable to communicate successfully with the attendant, who naturally spoke no French.
Norman sat down in his accustomed chair to rest for a moment and enjoy the performance. It really was a most amusing story, and Ginger was, like her mother, a comically self-dramatizing personality. They were both about six feet tall, rail-thin, with a page boy hairstyle that seemed cut out of black silk. Not quite beautiful, they were better than beautiful because they were so striking, and once they had your attention, they knew exactly what to do with it, launching into a story, pantomiming dramatically, and reproducing dialogue exactly and hilariously. In this case, the Shell serviceman’s puzzled and desperate English—expertly rendered by Ginger in a heavy redneck accent—was the perfect foil for her own volley of elegant French, which was naturally just so much gibberish to the poor guy.
Mme Boyer’s protégés this year were the best in a long while. Ginger would have no trouble getting into Yale, and Claire would probably end up at Smith. Even Rebecca, whose grades were not as good as the others, would easily be accepted at Emory. It would remain to be seen what Ginger would do with her Ivy League degree once she had it. Norman could easily imagine her using her four years in the Ivy League simply to obtain an Ivy League husband, in a sort of late 20th century version of what Southern girls used to do when they spoke of getting their MRS degrees from Bama or Ole Miss. In ten years she could be the hit of cocktail parties just like her mother was now, waving her stick-thin, heavily bangled arms frantically in the air as she acted out some story, while an appreciative audience laughed uproariously and her husband beamed from across the room with pride at his talented wife. And there was tons of talent involved, the way they seized on some gaffe or mishap as if putting themselves down, while actually they were dramatizing some aspect of their superiority, like this fluency in French.
A week ago Norman had been at a party with Virginia Cooley, who had regaled the whole room with some story about leading her half-blind mother-in-law into the men’s bathroom at the Mountain Brook Country Club; but the underlying point of the story was not—as Virginia insinuated—that she herself was half-blind from having drunk a bit too much on this occasion, but that her husband was now the president of the Mountain Brook Country Club, as the gentleman in the men’s room who encountered his mother had made clear when he congratulated her on her son’s recent appointment. However, Norman couldn’t help but adore Ginger as he adored her mother and anyone else who knew how to perform as well as they did.
Out of the corner of his eye, Norman watched Luke approach the group surrounding Ginger without looking at her or seeming to pay any attention to her. Instead, he appeared to be giving each individual picture on the wall careful scrutiny. Norman wasn’t fooled and no one else would have been either: Luke was still smitten with Ginger. He allowed himself only a certain amount of proximity before continuing on around the apartment, bouncing on his toes like a dancer or marathon runner flexing before the day’s event. Soon he was out of sight, and Norman could hear him speaking to his mother in the den, where she was smoking and watching television. Luke was an old favorite of hers; they shared a completely irreverent candor and sense of humor. She was planning to join the party later in the afternoon, after she had rested a bit from her exertions in preparing the food. She’d already met all of his students previously from her regular attendance at all the major school functions.
Then Luke was in the hall leading to the bedrooms, pulling books off the shelves lining the walls there and leafing through the pages. He was easily the most brilliant member of the senior class, but Norman had had more trouble getting a single completed application out of him than he had with Lori Wagner or Christopher Johns. If Luke had been as studious as he was brilliant, he would be bound for the Ivy League like so many of his classmates. But Luke never studied, did his homework or turned his assignments in on time. He was usually late to class, and when asked to hand in his work, he invariably needed to be reminded what the work was he needed to hand in. He had always read everything—not last night or last week in preparation for the assignment—but two summers ago out of his own curiosity and on his own initiative. His memory of the work would be good enough, and he’d rip a sheet of paper out of a notebook, dash off a page or two while the day’s lesson was underway, and bring his work up to the teacher’s desk halfway through the class period. Afterwards, he might go sit back down, or he might not. He liked to roam around the classroom just as he was roaming around Mr. Laney’s apartment at the moment. His intellectual energy was expressed through physical movement; it unfortunately wasn’t something he expressed on paper unless forced to do so. If the class discussion interested him, he might contribute to it, but if he was bored, he’d just pull a book off a shelf and start flipping through it. Even Gayle Naughton had had no choice but to accept his behavior. Fortunately he was not only brilliant but utterly charming in an impish way, with a head full of loose curls along with the mischievous, unfettered curiosity, boundless energy and short, athletic body of a young boy. Norman fervently hoped that NYU would take him.
One thing was for certain: he could forget about Ginger Cooley. If Luke was unconcerned, or even—as was likely—unaware of their extreme difference in height, it was the first thing she would have noticed and rejected about him years ago. She would never subject herself to the indignity of a date, an escort or a husband shorter than she was, and would no doubt regard short men as failures of manhood. Furthermore, she would want any man by her side to have an Ivy League degree matching her own, and would most likely, Norman guessed, end up with a husband who wasn’t averse to living in Birmingham and becoming part of her father’s ever-expanding commercial construction company. With two daughters, her father would no doubt welcome a son-in-law interested in joining the business. If Ginger ever yielded or responded to Luke in any way, he would have lost interest soon enough. But she cleverly kept him on a string, like a pet monkey, and Norman suspected that Luke, as a performer himself, was a sucker for Ginger’s comic opera. Norman was too, and found himself laughing out loud at her impersonation of the gas station attendant just as the doorbell rang.
He was disagreeably surprised to find Lori Wagner outside his door, apologizing for being late and chewing gum as if her immediate survival depended on it. Until that very moment, he had not been aware of her absence, but if he had been, would not have been sorry. She was irritating to him in the extreme; even the illiterate spelling of her name annoyed him no end. She didn’t belong in this group at his house any more than she belonged at the school itself. The mere fact that her family lived just outside the Mountain Brook city limits and didn’t want to send her to the Birmingham public schools accounted for her attendance at Brook-Haven. Her father owned a prosperous string of rental furniture stores found all over the less prosperous parts of Birmingham and outlying areas, like Pratt City, where Norman’s own brother was the manager of one such store. The Wagners could certainly have afforded any house in Mountain Brook, but had chosen instead to renovate a rambling mansion in the oldest section of Birmingham proper. If that indicated a certain amount of class, it wasn’t so much because they possessed any, (because they didn’t), but because they quite rightly suspected they’d never really be accepted in Mountain Brook and most certainly would never be accepted into the country club.
Tip Wagner always wore an open necked shirt with a gold chain glinting beneath a mound of grizzled, graying chest hair. His wife was always wearing what looked to Norman like a very short tennis skirt which just barely succeeded in covering her crotch. Her original hair color was insufficiently buried beneath the inexpertly applied peroxide administered by a hairdresser who obviously didn’t know what she was doing and did not have access to the best hair color products. It wasn’t that Norman was a snob, but he was a lover of beauty and a man of taste, and he simply could not abide tackiness.
Even so, if Lori had possessed the smallest scrap of intelligence, ambition, or talent, he would readily have embraced her and taken her under his wing. But she was just a gum-snapping, crotch-flaunting vulgarian like her mother, and it was best for him to ignore her presence like he did with Priscilla Bradley and the pot-smoking contingent. When he had complained once to Elizabeth Elder that a Brook-Haven education was wasted on the likes of Lori Wagner, she had remarked sharply that it certainly wasn’t wasted, since Lori would soon enough be a mother. At first he had stared at her in serious alarm, afraid that Lori’s crotch was going to bring forth the immediate fruit of her labors. (Which would be a catastrophic blow to Brook-Haven’s reputation, as Mountain Brook High School had not to anyone’s knowledge produced a teenage pregnancy.) But to Norman’s immense relief, Elizabeth had been speaking only in abstract terms, about the need for future mothers to have an education worthy of their most important task of raising the world’s children. Nevertheless, Norman was as unable to conjure interest in Lori’s future as in Lori herself. He tried his best to welcome her in and usher her forward into the living room without betraying his dislike.
In his brief absence, Karen had nervously retrieved her camera and was positioning herself to photograph Ginger against the backdrop of the Frohock as she entertained the other Frenchies and whoever else she could hold in thrall. Glenn Daniels had moved on, as most people of deep intelligence did with Ginger, and was now helping himself from the dining room table as he spoke with Dylan Elmore and Jason Simmons. Norman sat back down with a small sigh of resignation at Karen’s camera. It was probably best to let her proceed with taking pictures if that was the only way she could manage to enter into the occasion. Dylan, Glenn and Jason, now the focal point for her next photograph, were probably talking about the upcoming chess tournament. Dylan and Glenn would have ended up at Harvard together, Norman thought, if Elizabeth Elder had not exerted her influence over Glenn and his parents. Just as well, he conceded. Harvard was going to be among their list of acceptances. Might as well have Glenn add another prestigious name, like Williams or Amherst, to the list he had managed to get published in the paper every year. Glenn could always go from Williams or Amherst to Harvard Law, which was where he belonged, and from there to Washington, which was probably where he’d end up. In what capacity Norman wasn’t sure. Justice Department? Clerk for the Supreme Court? No doubt it would be some sort of public service, like his father performed, but on a grander scale and not in Birmingham. As for Dylan, Norman could see him remaining at Harvard for the rest of his life. The world didn’t produce many Sanskrit scholars. Jason Simmons no doubt had a brilliant career ahead doing whatever people did who were brilliant with math.
Bebe Bannon came toward him with a plate of his food and a smile as large and dilated somehow, as her round, looping penmanship.
“You look hungry, Mr. Laney,” she said. “So I brought you this.”
“Oh, thank you, darling,” he said with sincere gratitude. “And thank you, darling,” he said to Sally Lindgren, as she came up with a glass of iced tea sprouting a sprig of mint just like she knew he liked it.
These two had not the faintest beginnings of the intellect possessed by the likes of Glenn Daniels or Dylan Elmore, but they knew enough to know they should learn all they could about Art and Culture, and they worked seriously and earnestly. Knowing they would never be his star students, these two dear children had opted instead to be his handmaidens, and Lord knew, he needed them. If it weren’t for them, he would never have been able to direct the spring play year after year, and he had no idea what in the world he would do without them next year. He didn’t even have to open his mouth for them to know what he wanted and execute it, like bringing him food and drink when he was suddenly starving but too exhausted to get up from his chair.
Unwisely, he had stayed up till four in the morning—not reviewing the faculty recommendations or grading exams as he should have done—but reading A Confederacy of Dunces, which Edward Allison had given him last night at Libba’s party, saying Norman had to read it because he was the living incarnation of Ignatius Reilly, the novel’s protagonist. With the best of intentions, people were always doing this to him—saying he had to read or go see something or other because someone or other in it reminded them of him. Ignatius Reilly was by no means the worst thing he’d been compared to: that distinction would probably go to the fat redneck named Junior on Hee Haw, who resembled Norman Laney only in physical amplitude. But for some reason, this latest comparison offended him most deeply.
It was exactly like Edward Allison to seize on a superficial parallel and miss the fundamental differences that ruled out any real comparison. True, he and the elephantine anti-hero of John Kennedy Toole’s novel shared a love of food, though Norman would never eat the jelly doughnuts or frozen pizzas that Ignatius consumed. True, they both lived alone with their mothers, who were similar blue collar personalities with a similar blue collar kind of candor. And true, there was a certain lordly grandiosity in their personalities, in keeping with the grandiosity of their physique. But there the resemblance ended and the more important differences began. The most obvious of which was: Ignatius Reilly was a medievalist while Norman Laney was most decidedly a Renaissance man. (Trust Edward Allison to be completely insensible to the significance of this disparity.) There were dozens of other divergences he could catalog, but the most crucial of these was: when Ignatius Reilly had been a teacher—for a brief and disastrous period of time—he had dumped all his students’ ungraded exams and essays out the window.
Naturally, Norman often wished he could do exactly the same thing with his students’ exams and papers, especially the ones he had not been grading while he was reading the Toole novel last night. Of course, he hated grading as much as Ignatius Reilly did. Who wouldn’t? Of all those demands placed on a teacher, this was the worst, especially for an English teacher, who had to become like a dentist of the mind, inspecting the mental rot and intellectual cavities he would greatly prefer to avoid. But as much as he might hate it, he did it anyway. That was the point. He took on that job, and he did it. Not without grumbling, but he did it. He confronted those untended brains and did his best to stop the decay, fill the cavities, straighten and polish up the rest till it was as close to gleaming perfection as it could get.
The polite, pleasant and attractive faces—even beautiful or handsome faces—that came into the dentists’ offices for their routine visits were often only covering up a world of rottenness underneath their appealing façades. Did the dentist lose his respect for these people, he had often wondered, when they opened their mouths and revealed the foulness within? As a teacher, he was constantly struggling to maintain his respect for students who could appear so bright, so eager, so precocious and wise in the classroom; and yet when he peered into the inner workings of their minds through the medium of their own often poorly written words, he found the shocking results of laziness and neglect, the dreadful corrosion caused by overindulgence in harmful substances, like television and pop music. He would much rather deal with just the faces, which were presentable enough, especially in Mountain Brook; but it was his job to get at the brains.
It was work. Hard work. He was not as diligent as Gayle at poking into all the soft spots; he would never be the type who circled comma splices. And he was not as stalwart as Elizabeth, who could stare down the dark corners with the strong light of her superior and implacable reason. He chose to treat through example and inspiration. So he was by no means perfect, and in the eyes of many, was by no means the best at what he did. But he did it. Again, that was the point that Edward Allison so shamefully failed to see. He did not, like Ignatius, lie around in bed all day—though he might have liked to sometimes—filling up Big Chief notebooks while nursing his bloating stomach and tending to his absurd erections. He was out there doing far more important work than Edward Allison did, though naturally, Edward Allison’s bow ties, downtown corner office and extremely limited intelligence would prevent him from perceiving this particular truth. His work was a lot harder too: kindling the soggy brain of someone like Edward Allison’s son—much harder than anything Edward Allison had attempted. (And if he had attempted to fuel his son’s mental development, there was no evidence that he had succeeded whatsoever.)
Norman had never asked to be rewarded appropriately for the work he did. No true teacher ever expected that: not in this country or this lifetime, anyway. But he did expect not to be ridiculed. Of course, behind his back, he was ridiculed all the time. But usually, no one dared ridicule him to his face, especially if they owed him deepest gratitude for educating their dull-witted son and doing his damnedest to get him into a decent college. Comparing him to the farcical Ignatius was outright mockery. Was Edward so dim-witted himself that he couldn’t see that? As if his problem with the headmaster weren’t enough, along came Edward Allison to add insult to injury and give him no choice but to read the book he’d been deliberately avoiding during the four years since it was first published. And this was a Christmas present too.
As good as he was at making other people laugh and helping them see the humor in almost anything, his own life was certainly no comedy and definitely not the kind of exaggerated farce in the novel he’d read last night. He was not a performing elephant and his life was no circus. Of course, if he were in the mood to be honest, he’d have to admit that he often carried on like a performing elephant whenever it suited his purpose. But he wasn’t in the mood to be honest. He disguised a sudden yawn by pretending to sigh deeply.
This was Bebe Bannon’s cue. “Here,” she said, taking his mysteriously empty plate. “Let me get you some more.”
“I enjoyed seeing your mother last night,” he lied half-heartedly to Sally.
She nodded. “I can’t believe what they’re saying about you, Mr. Laney,” she said, tears forming in her eyes.
“What on earth, darling?” he said, much too loudly and with naked concern. Was he finally going to find out what Turbyfill had on him? From a student?
Sally was shaking her head as Ginger, sensing the drama elsewhere, began moving toward it with her coterie. “I just can’t believe it,” Sally repeated.
“What?” demanded Ginger. “What are you talking about?” Since Ginger knew how to project her voice so it carried throughout a room and dominated any given situation, everyone now became aware that something was up and began to crowd toward the chair where Mr. Laney was sitting.
“What could you possibly have heard to upset you like this?” said Mr. Laney, forcing his voice into nonchalance.
While Sally hesitated as if unable to utter a terrible truth, total silence descended on the group of students, who exchanged uneasy shrugs or shakes of the head.
“Tell us, Sally,” commanded Ginger sharply.
Sally turned around to face her. “Mr. Laney is leaving Brook-Haven!” she declared tremulously.
The silence which followed was the kind that could only be produced by profound shock or dismay.
“Oh, for the love of God,” said Mr. Laney, with just that mix of disgust and relief that instantly dispelled the rumor Sally had repeated.
“Norman leave Brook-Haven?” scoffed his mother, who had been drawn out of the den by the unnatural quiet in the living room. “The only way Norman will leave that school is in a coffin!” It was a tired old joke among students, alumnae, and even other faculty, but delivered in Mrs. Laney’s rasping, Pratt City drawl, it seemed freshly funny and new. The students laughed with relieved appreciation. (If Mr. Laney’s mother knew nothing about it, then there was nothing to know. He told her everything and often quoted back to them the outrageous responses his mother had made in between puffs on her cigarette.)
“How could such a ridiculous rumor get started?” demanded Mrs. Laney. “Everybody knows that even if that school catches on fire, Norman Laney will be the last to leave, and not because he’s a few pounds overweight.”
Norman shrugged his shoulders, bored and tired, while the students laughed again at his mother’s delivery of another stale joke. “Doesn’t take much to start a rumor in Mountain Brook,” he said.
His mother narrowed her eyes. “But rumors start somewhere, somehow,” she said.
Norman shifted in his seat, which was quite a production requiring that his hands actually lift the weight of his stomach and carry it from one side of the chair to another. “I was invited to come see the new building at Shelby State, Mother,” he said with asperity. “And out of politeness, I went.” He shrugged again. “Apparently, that’s all it takes to get gossip going in Mountain Brook.”
“But my mother said they’re going to offer you a job!” wailed Sally, as if thoroughly distressed and flabbergasted to learn that Norman Laney had options in life.
“Darlin’,” he said, as gently as he could. “They’re always offering me a job. The chair of English has been trying to get me to join his department for ten years.”
This had the effect of an atomic bomb. It was clear that the thought had never occurred to any of his students—even his most gifted—that he could be doing something else in life besides being their teacher. It wasn’t that they didn’t respect his intelligence or abilities, but they simply assumed that he—like their devoted parents—was put on this earth to serve their needs, that he was completely happy to spend his entire life doing so, and desired no other form of happiness.
As smart as many of them were, they were also equally sheltered. Only one out of the thirty-three in this senior class came from a broken home. It was probably no coincidence that this one—Malcolm Fielding—was the one headed for Wall Street. But even Malcolm had two loving if not married parents, and not one of these students had yet learned the hard fact of life that nothing and no one was put on this earth to serve their needs. They were all too ready to dismiss the glimmer of an unpleasant truth about Mr. Laney’s rumored free will. (Because after all, if he had willingly chosen to be their teacher, and just as deliberately had chosen and continued to choose not to exercise other options in life, then they owed him far more respect and gratitude than they were capable of demonstrating or perhaps even feeling. It was far easier to believe that those who were their teachers were there simply because they had no choice.)
No one noticed Karen creeping into the corner vacated by Ginger and her crowd until she snapped a picture of Mr. Laney in his chair surrounded by a group of students, many literally sitting at his feet. She was fairly certain she’d managed to capture the girl on the swing just beyond the chair as well. But once again she also managed to break the tension in the room and unleash the party spirit with the flashing of her bulb. Conversations broke out everywhere all at once, it seemed, and laughter bubbled up as if alcohol were being served rather than the exquisitely made iced tea from Mrs. Laney’s family recipe. Like a backlash to the moment of profound quiescence, a madcap mood took hold of the group and no crumb was remaining by the time the last student left Mr. Laney’s apartment at the unexpected hour of five-thirty.
Just as unexpected, this last student to leave was Luke Pendarvis.
“Glad you could make it,” said Mr. Laney, with the playful sarcasm he usually employed with Luke.
“Wouldn’t miss it,” said Luke, pausing at the threshold.
“Unless the plane ticket for Italy had been for today,” countered Mr. Laney.
“But didn’t you know?” said Luke. “It was for today. Until we found out about your party.”
Puzzled, Mr. Laney cocked his head sideways.
“I told my father I didn’t want to miss this, and he agreed,” explained Luke. “Said it would probably be the most significant event of my senior year. So he changed our tickets.” He held out his hand. “See you next year,” he said, pumping Mr. Laney’s hand once and then darting off as if a flare had just announced the start of a fifty-yard dash.
Mr. Laney remained standing on the threshold of his apartment door, staring intently into the vacant stairwell beyond the corridor, echoing with Luke’s thunderous steps. For a fat man and a high school English teacher, the kind of explicit validation he had just received from his student was not often forthcoming, and he needed a minute to absorb the shock and compose himself. After all, if he had been given a chance to be on a plane going to Italy yesterday … he would most certainly have been on that plane.