The heat in Penrose’s office had not worked properly all fall. By December his nose and ears were pink with cold, his fingers too thick and numb for typing. He wore a heavy, ugly wool sweater and fortified himself with thermoses of tea. He looked and felt ridiculous. Suffering had made him ineffectual. Outside his window the campus trees went from vivid color to rags of leaves to bare branches filled with ice. Students hurried along the sidewalks, intent on their own urgencies. The air in his lungs felt frosted. “This place will be the death of me,” he said aloud, since there was no one there to hear him.
The cheerful young department secretary said she would call Building Maintenance again if he wished, and Penrose said yes, would you please. When nothing had come of that he called them himself, sifting through the confusing listings in the directory. Did he want Operations? Routing? Environmental Hazards? He finally found the right office and called three times and each time they asked him to spell his name. “P as in Peter, E as in Edward, N as in Nancy . . . ” Pen plus rose, he wanted to say, how hard is that? How hard is it to send out a repairman?
Then on this morning near the end of the term, he found his office door open and a workman on a ladder with his head and upper body engulfed by a hole in the ceiling tile. Penrose, relieved but annoyed, contemplated saying something snappish about the long delay. He would have been within his rights. But there was always the fear of alienating the man and never getting his heat fixed. Besides, there was never any one person to blame for such things; that was the nature of the behemoth bureaucracy.
The ladder took up most of the small room. Penrose stood in the doorway. “Hello, are you here to fix my heat?”
“Gonna try,” said the man, still hidden in the ceiling. His voice was muffled. A bit of a drawl, a countrified voice.
“It’s been a problem for months,” Penrose said, irritated by try.
There was a series of hollow metallic bangings. Words came out in the intervals between them. “Yep . . . hydraulics in . . . these old buildings . . . can’t seem to get their systems squared away.”
“Ah,” said Penrose, as if he knew anything about hydraulics and was agreeing wisely. As usual, it was nobody’s fault; it was the system. He reached for the stack of Modern Drama I papers on his desk. “I guess I’ll go sit in the coffee room and stay out of your way.” He wanted to tell the man to make sure he locked up when he left, but that was pointless, the maintenance people had keys to everything, they came and went as they pleased.
Penrose retraced his steps downstairs and along the main corridor, walking as he always did, with his head canted downward and a half smile tucked into one corner of his mouth. That way if anyone greeted him he would be ready to respond, and
if they chose to ignore him, as was often the case, he could
pretend to be absorbed in his own ruminations. He imagined that the new generation of faculty, if they thought about him at all, wondered why he had not already died or retired or both. But he couldn’t afford to retire yet, and the health benefits being what they were, he could barely afford to die.
The coffee room was empty, he was pleased to see. He pulled one of the plastic chairs over to a side table, draped his coat on its back, and got out the notes for his upcoming class. A piece of paper lay face up on the table.
NEW COURSE, PLEASE ANNOUNCE!
English 405, Indigenous Critical Theory: Oriented toward imagining far-reaching social change through knowledge production as sites of indigenous activism and political thought, the course develops analytical frames at intellectual crossroads where epistemologies that gather under the “indigenous” sign meet democratic inquiry (and its concerns with recognition) and a transhemispheric critical theory.
There was more, but this was enough to unman him. The first time Penrose had encountered this new and hideous jargon, he’d thought it was a joke, a parody of all that was pompous and inflated, purest gobbledygook. He still felt that way, but it was a joke no one seemed to get except him. Scholarly papers, conferences, entire careers were now built on it, this language that was a fraud of a language, meant to obscure, mystify, bully. All the new, bright young hires wrote of hegemony and late-capitalist strategies of empire and protofeminists and psychomorphology and colonialism and elitist reification. It was an evil code he was unable to crack. Although this new generation now in ascendancy seemed to be against many things, racism and sexism and other isms, Penrose had not been able to discern what, if anything, they approved of. No matter; they had the wind in their sails. If any one of them had complained about the heat in their office, a fleet of maintenance trucks would have been dispatched immediately.
He was a dinosaur, a relic. They gave him the Intro to Literature courses to teach, the basic survey usually left to graduate assistants. He’d only held on to his drama courses because no one else wanted them. The knowledge of this beat him down day by day, curdled his disposition. He would have liked to point out to the smart, preening young scholars, so caught up in their third-world literatures and hermeneutics, whatever that was, that someday they too would be dead white men, just the thing they so disparaged. Most of them. There was of course the occasional woman, the occasional minority hire, full of nervous self-importance.
Penrose’s wife had long since tired of hearing about all this. “Why are you so obsessed with these people? Who cares what they do? You need to get on with your own work, whatever makes you happy.” Of course she was right—there was something cowardly about how eloquent he became in complaint, it shamed him—but the truth was, his own work had ceased to interest him. Even if there had been any demand for the kind of careful, stately reviews or papers he’d once produced, or a sequel to the book on nineteenth-century stagecraft that had won him tenure so long ago, he had no heart for it. It was finished, over, rusted shut. He’d said everything he’d wished to say, then resaid it in as many ways possible. It had been discouraging to realize that great, timeless literature, even that portion of it for which he had professed his special affinity and critical passion, was not an endlessly refilling well. He understood, in spite of himself, the appeal of the new order: at least it was new.
So these days, when he shut himself away in his study at home to do his “research,” he had a special project. It was a science fiction novel which recast a number of his departmental colleagues as grotesque and menacing aliens, androids, and intergalactic creeps. The title was Soldiers of Spiritos, the Spiritans being a cultured but vigorous and warlike race, menaced by various dark and degraded forces. The meanest and most arrogant of the critical theorists became Commander Gorza, a lizardlike creature deep in treacherous schemes, with a habit of spitting when agitated. The weak and craven Polypis, hereditary ruler of Spiritos, bore a striking resemblance to the department chair. There was also a pop-eyed robot modeled after the department’s serial sexual harasser, and Farella, a leather-clad shape-shifting demoness who called to mind the new assistant professor, brought in to head up the Lesbians in the Gothic Paradigm course. It was all great, trashy fun to write. Penrose thought he might someday publish it under a pseudonym—Penrose’s pen name!—amaze himself and everybody else by earning some actual money. Meanwhile, it gave him no end of pleasure to write lines like, “Curse the Spiritans and their doomed resistance! Soon their planet will be the latest outpost in the Devorkian Empire!”
One of the graduate students came in and began opening and closing cupboards in an annoying way. Penrose gathered his things. It was almost time for class.
But he wasn’t quick enough to avoid Herm Sonegaard, blocking the door, a heavy figure in a parka and galoshes. “Dick! Long time no see!” Sonegaard wore a striped ski cap with a tassel and exuded rosy winter warmth.
With other colleagues, Penrose could exchange polite greetings in mutual indifference. Herm demanded full engagement. “How’ve you been, Herm?”
“Never better,” said Herm, delighted at his own wit, something wry, precious, and British in his robust American mouth. Herm said it often enough that you imagined him ascending, rung by rung, into beatitude. “Just a sprint to the finish line, then Jessica and I are off to Puerto Vallarta.”
Penrose made appropriate envious noises. Herm had the poetry franchise in the department. His poems were widely published in journals Penrose had never heard of, then regularly bundled into collections by the university press. Penrose had not yet found a space for Herm in his novel. It was hard to parody someone who already seemed to be a walking parody.
Now Herm said, “You and Ellen should head south some year, stop in and see us. The place’ll get your blood flowing again. Sun on your skin. Sea air in your lungs. We hardly even wear shoes down there.”
“That sounds great, Herm.” As usual, Penrose had to increase his wattage to match Herm’s enthusiasm. “Maybe some year when the kids aren’t coming back for Christmas, you know how that is.”
“Quickie trip. Get on a plane in a snowstorm, get off and it’s eighty degrees. Daiquiris. Hibiscus. Water skiing.”
Penrose promised to consider it. He wondered, with some distaste, what going native with Herm and his newest, youngest wife might involve. Herm angled his body toward Penrose, an attempt at confidential communication. “You get to our age, Dick, you have to keep the batteries charged. No better place than south of the border.”
“Ah,” said Penrose, alarmed now. He nodded. “Lure of the tropics, that sort of thing.” Pictures came unwillingly to his imagination, the little drugstore selling Coca-Cola and potions made of cactus and bull urine, Herm counting out pesos . . .
Herm dug a sheaf of papers out of his briefcase. “Diatribe’s going to take the new essay. I just found out.”
The passing bell rang and Penrose was able to dodge the essay, which Herm seemed to want to gift him with. People attempted to squeeze around Herm, who still stood in the doorway. One of the junior faculty, a mop-haired young man in a velvet jacket, gave Herm a poisonous look. Herm, oblivious, began peeling off layers of outer garments and piling them in a collapsing heap.
“I’m off to class,” said Penrose. “Have a great time in Mexico, if I don’t see you.”
“Margaritas!” Herm called after him, stepping out into the corridor. “Cerveza! Y mas cervaza!”
Penrose gave him a backward wave. You had to give Herm credit; he was untroubled by the new, supercilious regime in the department. They couldn’t lay a glove on his cast-iron ego.
Penrose’s classroom was ominously silent as he approached. It was always better when there was some sort of chatter or social noise. It meant they were less likely to sit in a sullen, unresponsive mass while he tried to jolly them into a discussion. There were days, too many days, when he felt like a television screen tuned to a channel they didn’t want to watch.
“Good morning,” Penrose said, bustling in and making a busy show of unpacking his notes and books. A few drear and mumbling voices responded. There were twenty-five of them and only one of him. It was never a fair fight.
“Jason,” said Penrose, addressing a boy in a stocking cap, with his feet propped up on the desk in front of him. “I’m going to ask you to put your laptop away.”
“Aww, Professor Penrose.” He was wearing a black sweatshirt with a picture of a cartoon man being dismembered by a cartoon explosion. “I’m a multitasker. My brain works better when I do two or three things at once.”
Penrose held his ground until Jason sighed and shut the machine off. Penrose had only recently and reluctantly been introduced to all things computer. It was one more plague, students who wanted to send him their papers via attached files, who pestered him to put class material on an interactive website, and so on. And of course they all walked around plugged into headsets and cell phones, grooving and chattering away, while the knowledge and wisdom of the ages swept over a precipice.
“I have your papers to return to you,” Penrose announced, to a general groaning. “Yes, well you might groan. I was not as impressed as I had hoped to be.” He distributed the papers and waited as they flipped through the pages, past his careful, handwritten comments, to the circled grade at the end. They were aggrieved, most of them, he could tell. After all, hadn’t they gone to the trouble of typing and printing and handing in an actual paper, when they could have been doing something much more enjoyable? Their lot was cruel.
“Professor Penrose?” One of the girls, a sophomore majoring in Wardrobe, made complaint. “Why do we have to put down the acts and scenes?”
“So I can tell if you’re citing the play correctly.”
“But you know the play already, you know exactly where stuff is.”
“No, Alexa, I don’t know what ‘the part where Hedda Gabler goes all mental’ refers to. You need to be more precise and follow the standard format. If you have other questions about your papers, please come see me during office hours after class. Let’s get started on today’s material.”
They sagged in their seats. Make us, their body language announced. Like we care.
Patiently, he began to woo them. It was the last play on the syllabus, O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night. It still kindled something in him, this great family drama, the four damaged souls in their slowly darkening cage. He’d seen the Broadway production with Jason Robards Jr. as James Tyrone and Colleen Dewhurst as Mary, and he remembered it with near holy emotion. How could he make them feel any portion of that? How to make them love the thing he loved? So much of teaching came down to just that. He needed to strike a spark in them. He needed not to stand in front of one more bored, tolerant class and have them drain the joy out of him.
He began with talking about families, how everybody’s family had the potential for tragedy, as well as love and comfort. How none of us in real life had the opportunity to stage or to express our fears and feelings as eloquently as a playwright did. “This play of old sorrow, written in tears and blood,” O’Neill had called it. And yet the play begins on a fine summer morning, breakfast just over, the day full of promise. When do the tears and blood start showing through?
The class stared down at their textbooks, the only safe place in the room to look. Penrose measured out the silence. There had been times, in this class and others, when he had been tempted to let a silence extend itself, Zen-like, all the way to the bell at the end of the hour. But always he dutifully picked up the thread, inserted himself, asked the follow-up question or called on one of them. Today he was saved, as he so often had been, by his best student raising his hand. “Yes, Roger.”
“It’s right there at the start. With James talking about how young he feels. His saying so implies the opposite. Later, when he’s coming down on his sons and saying what a disappointment they are, that’s all about himself, him feeling threatened and bitter because life hasn’t turned out the way he wanted it to.”
Bless the boy. “Yes, I would agree,” said Penrose. “It’s a conflict that gets developed later. What else is a conflict in the family?”
A few more hands ventured upward, struggling against gravity, and the discussion lurched ahead. Roger inclined his big, pallid, serious face toward each speaker, listening. He had crimped, dark red hair and wore glasses with black plastic frames, like those sold in joke shops attached to false noses. Penrose worried about Roger, worried equally about his awkwardness and his intelligence. One didn’t want to see him head off to grad school as the path of least resistance; besides, he was too genuine and inquisitive to be a good fit in the new, glib order. He might make a good lawyer, or even a politician, if he could find himself a girl, someone to polish his geeky edges, give him a man’s confidence. Of course the girl would have to do all the work. Where was such a girl, brainy but unafraid, who would make a project out of him?
All this passed fleetingly through Penrose’s mind as he directed the class discussion, which was finally starting to jell. All of them had families of one sort or another, and no matter how loving or well-intentioned, there had been times that family life had felt as confined and boxlike as a stage set. There was the usual fascination with Mary’s opium addiction—to think, even a century ago, moms were getting high!—then they started in on the grandiose father and profligate brother, then Edmund himself, who was never quite the hero they wanted him to be. Because of course they wanted to be the ones who picked the scab, who revealed the flaws and hypocrisies of the others while making an attractive display of their own suffering. It was Penrose’s job, or part of it, to convince them that self-loathing was not especially attractive or desirable.
“The mother is just gross,” complained Alexa, flipping her hair from one shoulder to another. “She’s like, shooting up!”
“Like, eww,” said one of the boys, and Penrose gave him a sharp look, but it seemed he was only making fun of Alexa, and that was allowed, even tacitly encouraged.
Another student said that the drug use was all offstage, and that Mary was never unseemly or unladylike. “She’s just lost in a fog, like she wanted to be.”
Penrose got them started on the fog, the foghorn, and then the other physical artifacts—the lamps, the whiskey bottle—and then on to how character flaws were revealed by drama. James’s stinginess, Jamie’s failure, Edmund’s weakness. And how there were also traits that softened our judgment and gave complexity to the portraits. The hour glided past. Penrose felt it was going well. He picked two of the boys to read Jamie’s and Edmund’s parts in the last scene, Jamie’s best:
Never wanted you to succeed and make me look even worse by comparison. Wanted you to fail. Always jealous of you. Mama’s baby, Papa’s pet! And it was you being born that started Mama on dope. I know that’s not your fault, but all the same, goddamn you, I can’t help hating your guts—
The boys read well, thank God, and some of the wounding and passion came through, enough to turn the motley class into an actual audience, caught up in the play. Penrose himself picked up James Tyrone’s part:
A sweet spectacle for me! My firstborn, who I hoped would bear my name in honor and dignity! Who showed such brilliant promise!
Penrose was enjoying himself. He had a touch of ham in him, though teaching was as close as he’d ever come to acting. Edmund answered, then Tyrone had another line, but just as Penrose was hearing the sound of it in his head, anticipating it, they were all startled by a low, grunting noise from the back of the room. It dropped into the lull between speeches, loud and unseemly, an ugly, honking noise. It took Penrose a moment to identify it as sobbing.
“Sarah?” Penrose took a step forward, peering at the girl in the last row. “Are you all right?”
She shook her head, meaning, Never Mind. She was red-faced, either from embarrassment or her mysterious grief. She waved her hands, waving him off. Never Mind. Penrose hesitated, then, not wanting to make things worse for her, went back to the play. But the air had gone out of it, the class now unsettled and distracted. Penrose stopped the reading. It was almost time for the bell. He began to wrap things up, reminding them of the date their final papers were due, of the review session for the exam. All the while trying not to stare at Sarah Snyder in the back row. Who was she anyway? Unremarkable B student, unremarkable presence bundled into a chubby parka, rimless glasses, straw-blond hair pulled back in a wad. She wasn’t doing anything alarming now, just staring at the desk in front of her, the inflamed color of her cheeks fading.
The bell rang. Penrose dismissed them. He thought of trying to intercept Sarah Snyder—offer some word of concern or inquiry—but she was heading for the door on a bullet course, and besides, Roger was approaching with his usual intelligent questions.
Penrose spoke with him for a few moments, then they parted, and Penrose gathered up his books and went out into the hall. There was no sign of Sarah Snyder, which in some ways was a relief, but left him feeling bad, guilty, inadequate. There had to be a better way to handle such moments. Something intuitive and wise, involving human skills he did not possess. What did girls cry about these days anyway? Boyfriend? Pregnancy? How would he know? He could not now recall a single thing Sarah Snyder had ever said in his class.
He reached his office. The door was shut and locked. He went inside and put his hand to the heating vent. It was the cold of cold metal. It had not been a very good day for the Spiritans.
If there was an easy way to kill herself she’d do it this instant. She was crying again, snotty tears, disgusting, and the cold air made them sting. Could she be any more fucked up? What was wrong with her anyway? She was just a big stupid mess.
Sarah Snyder had escaped the English building and now she hurried across the quad, head down, hunched and shivering inside her big coat. She reached the end of the campus buildings without seeing anybody she knew, or anyone from her stupid class. God! How could she ever go back there? They probably thought her mom was a heroin addict or something.
She slowed her pace, blew her nose on a nasty piece of Kleenex she found in her coat pocket. Here was a coffee shop she sometimes went to, a place she liked for its deliberate shabbiness and the oddball music they played. But she might run into somebody there and she didn’t want to have to act normal or explain why she wasn’t. There was nobody in the world she could explain it to, because there was no real reason for any of it.
So she crossed the street that marked the boundary of campus and kept walking. She had it in mind to get herself good and cold, though she guessed she wouldn’t freeze to death or get consumption, like Edmund. It probably had to be dark for that.
The neighborhood was one of apartment buildings, hutches for students, mixed with small wood-frame houses, one or two stories, which she liked for much the same reasons she did the coffee shop, because they were old, eccentric, mysterious. There was a romance about their porch steps and shade trees, their gravel drives and tumbledown garages. At night their lighted windows were squares and rectangles of tender gold, as if the lives within them gave off a radiance. And there was always the chance that someone might open a door, start down their bricked path at just the time she was passing by, speak to her, ask her name, anything might happen . . .
A stab of remembering, her total spastic idiocy in class, Christ. Poor old Professor Penrose. He’d looked stricken, like he was the one who’d written the play on purpose to make people miserable. Now she bet he thought she had some tragic family she was boo-hooing about, when she had a perfectly normal one—mom, dad, sister, brother—who only drove her crazy in expected ways. She didn’t suppose anyone would believe her, because it was too simpleminded, but it had only been general, goopy sadness, the unfocused sadness of her whole life, that the play had called forth. So that crying for the people in the play had been like crying for herself, but in a nobler way, as if some of the tragedy had rubbed off on her.
There were people whose lives were worth ending up in poems or plays, but she wasn’t one of them. She was just an ordinary head case. So suck it up, Snyder! If her life was a play, she’d probably still be unhappy, but it would make sense, with stage directions and speeches. Why couldn’t she be weird in some interesting way? The occasional car passed, overtaking her without effort as she stumped along. Why didn’t she have a car? She could blast up and down the highway, smash into something.
Eventually she circled a block and doubled back, giving up on the idea of an adventure. She didn’t want to go home just yet; her roommate had a new boyfriend, and while Sarah told herself they weren’t trying to exclude her, sometimes she believed exactly the opposite, that part of the fun of couplehood was the exclusion of other people. It was all very ick-producing, the giggling and the furtive love chats, the hours spent behind the roommate’s closed bedroom door with the music playing, the sounds the music didn’t mask, the unerotic sight of the boyfriend’s bare ass slipping out of its towel wrap as he visited the bathroom, not to mention the residue of those visits. Still, she was envious. She’d never had a real boyfriend, only an ocean’s worth of
hopeless crushes, plus the occasional guy you’d hang out with, and sometimes the two of you would hook up. But sex hadn’t lived up to its billing, at least not so far, one more thing that she guessed worked better as literature.
When she was feeling low and ugly and hopeless, as she was now, she hated everybody: people in commercials made ecstatic by their purchases, politicians screwing up the entire world, anyone who hurt an animal, celebrities, the Walgreen’s clerk who always told her to have a blessed day, people who looked into mirrors and smiled, anyone on MTV, anyone who thought MTV was cool, anyone who used the word “cool,” anyone self-satisfied or loud or rude or whose cell phone ringer was a Justin Timberlake song, that being basically everyone in the whole school.
If she wanted to, she could drop out, move to Seattle or San Francisco or New York and get a real job. It was a big world out there and things were bound to happen to her as they never would here in the Land of Children. College, what was that for most people except a place to kill time before they went on to lead equally shallow adult lives.
She didn’t want to be one of them and of course she was, the whole time she was hating on them.
Without thinking about it, Sarah had retraced her steps across the quad and was standing once more in front of the English building. She hesitated before climbing the stairs and going inside, telling herself it was more than an hour since the end of class, it was unlikely anyone was still around. More than that, she was afraid that if she didn’t make herself go in now, face the scene of the crime, she might put it off forever. And that would be sad because she loved the old building, as she loved anything old and curious and worn, loved its white pillars and dormers and the curving twin staircases on the first floor with their railings rubbed down to the wood grain in places. She loved the stained wood flooring underfoot, as well as the odd cubbyholes, cloakrooms, dim passages, the classroom with the old-fashioned maps mounted on rollers above the blackboard, so that you could pull them down and behold, on crackling antique paper, charts of The Ancient World, or The Voyages of Magellan.
It was the lunch hour and the hallways were uncrowded. Sarah’s nerve failed her at the door of the Drama classroom, empty now, and she turned quickly away. With nothing in mind, as before, she took the stairs to the second floor. Radiators hissed and clanked. Light from the colorless, high overcast sky came in through the stairwell windows. Some kids said the building was haunted, and while Sarah didn’t believe that, she wouldn’t have minded being a ghost there.
Because she loved reading, she loved everything she’d ever read, Alice in Wonderland and A Little Princess and every sappy girl book that had come her way from the third grade on, and Dune and Kurt Vonnegut and Lord of the Rings and Shakespeare (at least the ones she’d seen as movies), and Emily Dickinson and Wuthering Heights and Hemingway and Willa Cather and Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. But it wasn’t anything you could impress people with. “I love to read.” Try telling that to a guy at a party, watch how fast he decides he needs to go get another beer.
She was only going to make a circuit of the building and leave—it would be safe to go home soon, her roommate would have to detach herself from the boyfriend and go to work—but she’d pushed her luck too far, and oh crap, here was Professor Penrose, heading straight for her.
At first Sarah thought he hadn’t seen her, since he was walking in that peculiar way he had, as if watching his shoelaces untie. Then, just as she thought she might escape, he raised his head. “Oh, Sarah. Were you looking for me?”
She said yes because no would have been rude, and besides she might have been expected to come looking for him, after her performance in class. And so she had to follow him as he turned around and led the way back to his office. He’d probably been on his way to the bathroom or something. He hadn’t looked all that happy to see her, no surprise there.
He unlocked the office door and went in first, so that Sarah had a moment to look around, get her bearings. She’d only been in here once before, at the very start of the semester, and she hadn’t remembered how beat-up the place was. Even for someone like herself, tolerant of, even enamored of, the secondhand and faded, the room was depressing. Its walls were a peculiar putty color, blotted and freckled like elderly skin. The books in the bookcases looked as if no one had opened them during her lifetime; the old-fashioned blinds at the window were cockeyed. It was cold in here too. It felt like a cell in the Bastille; really, all it needed was some straw on the floor and a few rats, but that was silly, she was the prisoner, the one called to account, and her stomach clenched as Professor Penrose, with his pained, antic smile, invited her to take a seat.
•••
In teaching, as in anything else, there were sins of commission and sins of omission. Penrose had a store of wincing memories, all the times over the years when he’d said the wrong, the clumsy, the hurtful, the fatuous thing. But there had also been the missed opportunities. He had the foreboding that in sitting down with Sarah Snyder, he was about to trade one sin for another. There was likely to be more weeping. Right now she looked sullen rather than teary, but that could turn on a dime, and anyway there was nothing to do now but see it through. “I was worried about you,” he said, after an interval of waiting in vain for her to say whatever it was she’d come to say.
Still she kept silent, a hopeless, obstinate silence, staring straight ahead of her, hands jammed in the pockets of her coat. She was not a pretty girl, which she no doubt knew very well. But surely she could have made a little more effort, or any effort at all, hair, makeup, something other than these hobo shoes, jeans, and an upper garment that could have served as a pajama top. Then, aware that he was not being the supportive, sympathetic elder he aspired to be, he checked himself and asked, “Did you want to talk about your paper?”
She bent over to rummage in her backpack, another unlovely posture, he was forced to notice, retrieved it, and handed it over. Penrose studied it, as if to refamiliarize himself with it. There was no need. It was the same as all her other papers. Dogged, mechanical, neither very good nor notably awful. The B had been a coward’s grade. A C+ would have been more honest. “Characterization in A Doll’s House.” Oh, boredom. Penrose said, “I’m not sure you were all that interested in your topic.”
“I wasn’t.”
Penrose waited, but nothing more came of this unpromising beginning. “Well then, my next question would be, why choose a topic that didn’t interest you?” Why read the play, take the class, go to college in the first place?
The puffy coat wriggled, evidence of some bodily movement underneath. Shoulders shrugging? “I don’t know, I guess I couldn’t think of anything else.”
The passing bell rang then, and there was a scattering of noise, distant doors opening, feet on the stairs, voices. The intrusion only emphasized the peculiar intimacy of the small room, and the two of them within it. Although times being what they were, Penrose was always careful to leave his door wide open, so that no hint of impropriety was conveyed, even by such an unlikely Lothario as himself. He began again. “Now you can do better than that. You have to. If you didn’t care for a particular play—”
“I like it a lot,” the girl said with heavy vehemence.
Once more Penrose waited. “All right. What did you like about it?”
“When Nora leaves at the end . . . when she realizes that Torvald isn’t worth it, that she has to go out into the world and be her own person . . .”
She broke off, and resumed her sullen silence. “Well,” Penrose said, “I’m glad you can relate to the character.” He was, of course, biologically disqualified from participating in feminist grievances, although that did not spare him from having to hear all about them. “But your enthusiasm doesn’t really come through in the paper.”
Another convulsion of the coat. “Writing, papers I mean, is really hard for me.”
“Then you need to try and work on that.” She looked unconvinced. “There’s nothing grammatically or organizationally wrong with what you wrote. You just didn’t come up with a strong enough—”
“I don’t know how! I never know how to say I like stuff!”
“But you had reasons you liked the play. You need to start with those.”
“Papers aren’t about liking things! They’re about showing how smart you are!”
And here were the tears again, or their angry cousins, though she was not, technically, crying. Her eyes were red and her cheeks mottled. “I really like Long Day’s Journey, too, I mean, I love it, when you guys were reading it out loud it was like, the most beautiful, awful thing—”
She stopped for breath and Penrose, helpless, waited for whatever would come next. “Why does everything have to be about reasons, and making everything into ideas. I don’t think that’s why you’re supposed to read anything, that’s not why people write plays, so somebody else can come along and turn it inside out and find all different ways to show how important they are . . .”
She stopped and tried to inhale the tears. “I guess I’m just not a very good English major.”
“Maybe not,” Penrose said. He could tell from her abrupt, startled expression that she had not expected him to agree with her. “But that doesn’t mean you’re wrong.”
“What should I do then, quit?”
“If there’s something else you’d enjoy more. I wouldn’t want you or anybody else to keep suffering through these classes. If that’s what you’re doing, suffering.”
He let a silence settle. The Zen of silence. The pure space of empty air. And this time he was rewarded. “I like the class,” Sarah Snyder said, in a normal, deflated tone. “I guess I like all kinds of things that don’t like me back.”
“That’s more common than you know. So I wouldn’t—”
There was more to say, but he stopped himself, and the girl was no doubt suspicious of him, thinking him melodramatic or senile or both, but he was listening to the sound of water trickling through the ancient pipes behind the walls. Hydraulics! As faint as perfume, as a chink in the rampart of cold, he felt a wafting current of warm air.
Penrose turned back to her. “Do you have your copy of O’Neill with you? Why don’t you get it out.”
Another struggle with the backpack. “Good. Turn to the end of Act I, where Mary and Edmund are talking. Start here, where Mary says, ‘I’ve never felt it was my home.’”
She looked perplexed. “What for?”
“For fun.”
She pondered this. The concept of fun. “But I’m not a very good Mary. I’m not old enough.”
“Do I look like your son Edmund?”
A shake of the head. She would have liked to giggle. “Right here,” said Penrose, tapping the page.
A slow start, the girl still uncertain of him now as well as herself. By the end of the first long speech she had her wheels underneath her and was hitting some of the right inflections—exasperation, resentment. Penrose’s irritable Edmund chimed in. Then Mary again, then Edmund, back and forth, guilt, denial, bitterness, all the paces of the addict’s dance. It was the most beautiful, awful thing. An ember flaring up as they breathed on it. Old sorrow made new again. Sarah Snyder’s free hand, Penrose noted, had begun to drum and twitch like Mary’s. She had the right instincts, underneath all that self-inflicted misery. He liked her, although she probably would not have believed it, that anyone would like or admire her for her own contrary self. She would not be happy, at least not anytime soon. She was too stubborn and full of grievance, her anger not yet a weapon she could wield. Penrose thought he should find a place for her in his book. He would make her a young acolyte or warrior, a foot soldier in the army of the righteous.