thirteen

AS I SAT waiting for Littlefield I passed the time, and beguiled anxiety, by again trying to put this mess into some sort of appropriate Shakespearean claptrap:

I shall be packed ere thou me packing send’st

And find some place to cool my spirit’s flush.

The shade in which we lie the very sun from which

We seek escape himself hath ’factured,

Luring from summer boughs the self-same leaves

That make a rustling haven from his heat.

E’en so th’identical Power that deals us ill

Some consolation fashioneth betimes.

So husbandmen whose fields to drought are lost

Will fear no more the pestilence and frost;

And suitors spurned are banished in their need

By rosy lips they’ll never have to feed.

I shook my head again at how easy it was to turn out this stuff. Congratulating myself that I was at last out of all stifling academic concern with it.

I had drunk a good third of the bourbon by the time Little-field arrived, and so it was doubtless this bottle courage, utter recklessness of consequence, that made me throw my crutches under the bed and crawl in after them when I heard him drawing near.

I lay there still as a mouse, listening to Littlefield come slowly up the stairs and down the corridor to my room. I could visualize him advancing with his shuffling gait and his thatch of iron-gray hair—the “literary mane.” “Where’s my Elizabethan man?” he sang out while still coming down the passage, in his rather affected baritone. No, he was impossible. He even looked like a professor. He would have to go.

I could hear him enter my room on Mrs. Duncan’s shouted instruction as to its whereabouts, and imagine the baffled glance accompanying the mumbled expression of his failure to locate me anywhere in it. He puttered back out to the head of the stairs to report this lack of success to Mrs. Duncan. Next was heard her firmer tread mounting the stairs and entering the room, after perhaps a brief glance into the open bathroom. She marched straight to my bed, and I saw her policewoman’s face peering under it at me as she bent down with the lifted skirt of the spread in one hand. “There he is.”

By the time I had writhed out from under she was gone, leaving Norm Littlefield the sole witness of my struggles. “I was just … Seemed the only … Because she’s always …” I explained, heaving myself up onto the bed by my elbows, like a tired swimmer onto a rock. I wriggled backward until I lay stretched out full-length, hauling my inert leg up last, and panting heavily.

“Well so. It’s nice to see you, Norm. Have a seat.”

Littlefield’s face, at best scarcely suited to the expression of even one emotion, was put to considerable strain now with three or four to register simultaneously. His nose was too small for his high forehead, and both were too narrow for his chin, a wide, jutting feature with a large dimple in it, like a second navel. It seemed, his face, a composite of portions of three different faces, like those combinations which participants in newspaper contests are required to unscramble and properly reassemble with their rightful components. Vice President Hubert Humphrey gives somewhat this same impression, though on a much better-looking and agreeable scale. In Littlefield’s case everything was somehow, or seemed somehow, pulled together by his curved meerschaum pipe, which in his doubt he now produced, filled from a tobacco pouch, and lit. I watched him, unable to think of a single thing to say now that the dreaded confrontation was here at last. I could feel the ants stirring in my cast again, and promised myself that the minute I was alone in the house once more I would try sucking them out with the nozzle of Mrs. Duncan’s vacuum cleaner.

There was some transitional talk about my break, how things were going with my classes in my absence. I held out little hope of my being once again fully mobile for some weeks, perhaps even months. Then he said something that rather took me by surprise.

“I for one can’t wait to have you back, of course.”

“You for one can’t wait to have me back?”

He became flustered and, looking away, rubbed the stem of his pipe against his nose.

“It goes without saying that I appreciate that vote of confidence. Ill-timed it certainly was, and unfortunate in that it created a disturbance in chapel. But that makes it all the more heart-warming to me. The fact that it was so spontaneous, Tom.”

I nodded, staring fixedly at the navel in his chin, my gaze just clearing the toes of my upturned crippled foot, elevated on a pillow in keeping with the doctor’s instructions.

Norm continued with visible emotion.

“Yes, it makes a man feel good to know who his friends are when he’s under fire, as I told you over the phone in the hospital, and to hear his friends rally to his banner. Dean Shaftoe and President Bagley now understand clearly that I do have support—”

“And if they give you the heave-ho it means, by God, that several of us—”

“No. Don’t say that, Tom. Don’t go that far - yet. Thankful as I am for what I know you were going to say. Let’s leave that bridge till we come to it. Just let me go on with my point, that now the authorities know I have support in my department and that it has the courage to become vocal if need be. Our faction is in the minority, yes, but less so than when that editorial came out in the Polycarper. It’s given others the guts to come out. Newcombe grasped my arm in the hall and said, ‘You can count on me too, Norm.’ It makes a man—”

Here Littlefield was so overcome by emotion that he brushed at his eyes, and I could feel tears welling up in mine.

“It was nothing, Norm.”

“It was everything. That testimonial may have been the turning point. And it goes without saying that as soon as I reasonably can I’ll recommend your promotion to associate professor. With tenure. Of course that depends on my remaining in power in the department.”

“Well, here’s one boy you can bank on, believe you me! And don’t think I’m only thinking of the promotion as such, and hike in pay, or whatever. I even forget what it is.”

“A five-hundred-dollar raise the first year and another five hundred the next. There’s a regular scale for that.”

What ran through my head was a hymn I had sung so often in the mission, with the line “And the burden of my heart rolled away.” The tide of this ecstatic relief had no more than begun to flood me than it ebbed, as, with a sickening plunge, I remembered the letter in the mailbox.

I got rid of him as fast as I decently could, bumping down the stairs on my behind to see him out in order that, having said goodbye at the door, I could watch from the curtained pane till he was safely out of sight, and then descend the outside porch stairs to the mailbox, which was almost directly in front of the house, as I have said. I risked breaking the other leg in the speed with which I hobbled over to read the schedule on the postbox. According to it, the next pickup would be at six o’clock—five to ten minutes from now. I breathed a prayer of thanks, only hoping the mailman had not been early and already gone. There had not been a pickup since I had given the letter to the liquor delivery man to drop.

I loitered about the mailbox as nonchalantly as I could, considering that I was in a bathrobe as well as between crutches. This drew the gazes of passersby, and also, finally, that of a policeman who appeared on the corner opposite. I have mentioned that the other side of the street bordered the campus, whose square half-mile was roughly his beat. He eventually strolled over, apparently overcome by curiosity.

“Something wrong?”

“No. I’m just waiting for the mailman. He should be along any minute. Thanks just the same.”

He went back across the street, but remained in view, trying to affect offhandedness himself as he paced in a narrow range with his stick dancing on its thong. I had no doubt that Mrs. Duncan was drinking in the scene similarly from the parlor window, to which I resolutely kept my back.

At last a red, white and blue truck rumbled to a stop at the curb and a mailman sprang out and came over, drawing out his key chain. As he squatted to scoop the contents of the opened box into his pouch, I said, “Look, there’s a letter in there that I mailed by mistake. I’d like to have it back if I may.”

He shook his head, squinting up at me. “Can’t give it to you.”

“Why not? If I can prove it’s mine.”

“It’s now in the official custody of the Post Office, and my official responsibility.”

“There it is!” I said, recognizing it. He drew out the letter I indicated, though withholding it from my eager grasp. “It’s absolutely essential that that letter be not delivered. It’s a matter of life and death. Can’t I recall something that’s mine?”

“Yes, but I can’t give it back to you. Not just like that. You’ll have to come along to headquarters with me to claim it. You’ve got to make out a form.”

“All right, fine. Let’s go.”

“Don’t you want to put on some other clothes?”

“These are all right. Are you about ready to pull in?”

“Couple of more stops.”

I stood for the brief ride to the Post Office, there being only the single driver’s seat in that kind of pickup truck. The driver was a rangy man with bushy red hair and narrow eyes, which he kept averted except when a traffic maneuver justified his turning his head in my direction in a more or less natural manner. At such brief intervals I could sense him taking me in sharply. He said nothing, save for an inquiry or two about my broken leg. We passed the Christ and Holy Trinity Garage, just beyond which he made his final pickup before turning a corner and pulling in behind the central Post Office.

I had rather a time getting up a short flight of steps to the rear platform near which he parked, before clomping up to a desk to which I was ushered for the discharge of my business. There, under the supervision of a proper official, I made out the necessary form for the recovery of my mail, identifying myself to his satisfaction by writing out the name and address of the intended recipient in handwriting that, of course, matched the original on the envelope, and rattling off some of the opening paragraph of the letter. He then returned the letter to me, explaining that regulations required his retaining the envelope, a forfeit I was glad enough to make.

Though the Post Office was now closed, a couple of doors were unlocked for me which let me out the front entrance of the building. Fortunately the outside steps were broad and shallow enough to accommodate my descent in an upright position, though even so I attracted a number of gazes as I made my way down them toward the curb. There I presently managed to hail a cab, into which I sank with a sigh, exhausted but happy, clutching the letter in the pocket of my robe. In that was also enough for the taxi fare, a crumpled bill and some change left over from transactions with my vintner. Now I could, without a cloud in sight, sing of how the burden of my heart had rolled away. Indeed I hummed a few measures of the hymn under my breath.

There was an instructive object lesson in my deliverance—the moral of the episode it could very well be said. Salvation had come from precisely that quarter from which I had all along feared danger. Predicament and solution have often enough a common source. I had been so blindly engulfed by my own share of the bottomless folly of mankind that I had forgotten its universality. Littlefield was as big an ass as I. The next man generally is as great a fool as oneself. Egotism and vanity guarantee it.

As Shakespeare said, “Why should I fear the likes of me?”

Or did he?