Peaceful for a short happy while, then the grade rose again and his eyes widened in the dusty windshield. But Levin got used to it: Steeplechase, you did what the bear did. There were many mountains and you took them one by one, paying no attention to the rest of the family. Soon the worst seemed over. Descending, Levin was surprised to sail through a momentary hamlet, a cluster of jerry-built, long-unpainted houses around a general store with a dirty gas pump in front. Here too America; you learned as you lived, a refreshing change from books. Out of the townlet and embarked on a broadly winding level road, he hypnotically watched a puff of smoke float up from his radiator and evaporate, Levin at once apprehensive of trouble although he couldn’t call it by name. He wondered whether to drive back to the gas pump, but the narrowness of the twisting road made a turn impossible. And he didn’t like going back once the plan was to go forward. It was getting late, he was slow, Nadalee was waiting. He
studied the hood at intervals, and seeing no more smoke, vowed not to stop until the first service station he hit. By the merest chance his eye caught the progress of the needle of the temperature gauge. It was flirting with HOT. “What’ll I do now?” Levin asked himself, trying to recall what the manual that came with the car said, but remembering only confusion. So he drove on till he again spied smoke. The red needle had struck HOT. Fearing fire, he quickly brought the Hudson to a stop on the road and shut off the ignition. A cloud of steam rose from the radiator. Levin, agitated, lifted the hood. He burned his fingers trying to unscrew the water cap, then managed to turn it with a folded handkerchief. A hissing stream of steam and bubbling brown water spilled over, a pox on ex-Dean Feeney. Levin remembered having read about this under BOILING OVER.
Two hours later he was on his way again. The sun was sinking and he was very late. He had been pushed by a pickup truck to a small gas station in a logging village not too far away, whose owner-and-mechanic-on-duty had “gone home for half hour,” it said on a stenciled strip of cardboard on the gas pump. Levin fretted as he waited, because he had only twenty dollars in his pocket and Friday was going fast. When at last the man had appeared, he recommended a reverse flush, and though this sounded like a bad poker hand it suited Levin if somebody who knew said so; but the operation took more than an hour, the man wandering off every so often to attend his pump or sell something. Levin walked down the road and sat on a rock watching time hurrying by and nothing he could do about it. He considered trying to call Nadalee to tell her what had happened but gave it up as too complicated. He had estimated–she had—that they would be together by four, but four had come and gone, and with it went some of the beauty of the day and the pleasure of anticipation, because he liked things to work out as planned, time and all. He seriously wondered whether to take this incident as a warning of sorts, yet cheered up when the car was ready, paid twelve
dollars courageously, and was again en voyage with a full gas tank and recommended change of oil, although he had changed it last week. He warily watched the temperature gauge, suffering when the needle went up and rejoicing when it settled back. Since the coast was only thirty-five miles away, he gave himself at the very most an hour to get there, counseling calm, the fun was yet to be, Nadalee will wait for me. The road was presently good and he clocked five miles in six minutes. Although the sun had sunk, and shade arose in the fields, a golden-green glow hung in the sky. He enjoyed the stillness, each tree still, the timbered hills multiplying silence. With some misgiving he climbed a new rise. At the first turn of the road a log truck, like a fat worm pulling itself out of a hole in the earth, rumbled forth hauling the largest, most terrifying hunk of wood Levin had ever seen; it looked like a threat to humanity. He pulled the Hudson quickly to the shoulder of the road, holding his foot hard on the brake until the long truck puffed by. When Levin was ready to move he discovered he couldn’t, his right rear wheel sunk in a ditch.
“I’ll die,” he muttered after twenty minutes of struggling to free the wheel. Not one car had come by. He pictured himself frozen to death in the Hudson during the night. In the morning they would haul off a stiff corpse; he had read of these things in the paper. Levin desperately figured he had to do something, but the right rear wheel had no respect for reason or will. He was wondering why he had come on this impossible journey when a tractor rattled around the bend and wobbled towards him. It was an old machine, the farmer driving it a wizened man with a small leathery face. He wore a wilted straw hat, and sat up on a high seat, swaying as he sat.
To Levin’s astonishment the machine passed by, the farmer lost in thought; he had to yell to get his attention. With a clank the tractor came to a halt, the driver gazing back at Levin as though he couldn’t understand where he had risen from.
“Excuse me for bothering you,” Levin explained, “but I’m stuck in this ditch.”
The farmer in silence got down from the seat, dug a length of rope out of his tool box and knotted it to Levin’s front bumper. In less than a minute the Hudson was out of the ditch. It had happened so fast he could hardly believe it.
“Three cheers for the American Farmerl”
The farmer smiled wanly. “Say,” he said, “could you give me a hand with some trouble I been havin’ of my own?”
“Gladly,” said Levin, “although I have an important engagement.”
He stepped out of the car. The farmer fished in his tool box and came up with a pair of needle-nose pliers.
“Got an achin’ tooth here at the back of my mouth. Could you give it a pull with these pliers?”
Levin’s muscles tightened to the point of shivers. He saw himself trying to pull the tooth, breaking it, not being able to get it all out, as the man bled, and it ended by his having to drive him to the hospital. Yet he wanted to show his gratitude to the farmer for rescuing him from the ditch.
“Couldn’t I drive you to a dentist?” he said. “I’m on my way to the coast.”
“Can’t stand ‘em,” the farmer said. “An’ I got thirty head of Angus to look after. I’m alone by myself since the missus died.”
Opening his mouth he touched a gnarled finger to the offending tooth, a discolored snag.
Levin tried several times to get the pliers gripping the tooth.
“Is this it?”
“Feels like. I ain’t sure.”
He withdrew the pliers from the farmer’s mouth and handed them to him. “I’d only hurt you without doing any good.”
“Sure hurts anyway,” the man said. He tossed the pliers into the tool box and climbed up on his high seat. The tractor rattled down the hill.
“God bless your tooth,” Levin called after him. Failed again, he thought.
He started the Hudson and stepped on the gas. “Nadalee, I’m coming.”
It was almost six. I’ve got to make time. He sped along the mountain road, wondering why it was so dark, then hurriedly switched on his lights, gasping as the beams flew forward and were trapped in pools of fog. A sense of doom infected him and he fell to brooding. Where is the fog, in or out? He had slowed to a crawl, every minute convinced he would the very next go shooting into space. Should he stay rooted? If he stopped where he was and escaped being smashed in the rear, he would have to stay put until the fog lifted, if it did, in the morning. If he went on how would he know if he was on the road or off—levitated in space before the ultimate crash, decapitation, dismemberment—what sort of terrible end for a man who had lived through so much in his life and had so many plans?
He drove on with droplets of mist in his beard, at ten miles an hour, and could see only as many feet ahead, frightened by awesome crags that loomed up before him and the fragments of bare rock over his head. Every few seconds he braked, sounding his horn like a wail as he went, by the greatest good luck skirting half-hidden boulders and grotesquely twisted tree trunks whose crowns were shrouded in fog. He had endless visions of disaster, monotonously called himself “idiot” for having invented this purgatorial journey. Levin promised himself he would celebrate if he got out alive.
It seemed to him, his nerves pricking through his skin, that he had journeyed for years on an abandoned road, had started as a child but was surely by now somebody’s grandpa, his hair turned bone-white, although the face, when he caught a reflected glimpse of it, looked hauntingly dark. He felt he had crawled on for hours, without confidence that he knew which road was presently which, and after a while, with a sense of not much caring. He went where the road went, because it was there; where it ended he would.
He saw then, lit in his headlights, a horse—could it be?
—No, this was a mule standing immobile in the road, gazing at something in the night. It slowly came to Levin, for he was worn out, that the mule was not a nightmare; it was real and he was staring at it from a distance of thirty feet; and that the fog had broken into moving patches; the sky glowing with stars, amid them the moon. Yet even as he sighed in unbelievable relief at the lifting of the fog, the mule, like a stone statue, stood broadside on the road, impassable at either end. Ten feet from the animal Levin stopped the car and got out to see what he could do about moving it, offering first a Life Saver, gingerly holding it a foot from the mule’s nose, hoping it might mistake the candy for sugar, but its nostrils didn’t even mildly twitch. Levin, walking down the road in the glare of his headlights, tore up some wet ferns. He tried holding out a handful but the salad did not tempt the animal. In exasperation he hunted for a rock to bounce off its bony back, but as he was looking, gave up the thought. In the car he cradled his head on his arms folded on the wheel. The horn blast startled the mule. It gave a frightened whinny and took off in an unknown direction.
The moonlit road stretched ahead for visible miles and Levin made fast time. But after he had traveled another twenty-five and still saw no end to his journey, continuing doubts tormented him. Was he on the right road or headed for Mexico or Canada? Would he get there tonight? Would she still be waiting? With these worries he drove through a covered bridge, and as he emerged, saw headlights rising in the distance. Levin pulled to a hasty stop several feet beyond the bridge. After two minutes a car approached. Stepping out of his Hudson, Levin waved both arms and succeeded in flagging down a Dodge of ancient vintage, the driver braking to a screeching stop.
“If you’ll pardon me,” Levin said, “I’m looking for the coast. How far to go would you say?”
The driver, an old man wearing a large hat and rimless glasses, peered at Levin’s limp beard.
“You a Mormon or somethin’?”
“Just a citizen.”
“Live in Cascadia?”
“Yes.”
The man lifted his hat, and with a finger of the same hand, scratched his veinous bald cranium.
“Beats me,” he muttered. “Ain’t it t’other way?” He pointed back over Levin’s shoulder.
A minute later his car disappeared into the covered bridge. Levin, about to collapse, tried to figure where he had gone wrong. He guessed in the fog. Somewhere in it he had missed a turn and taken the wrong direction. It served him right for his evil intentions.
As he drove aimlessly on, in sadness contemplating all the failures of his life, the multifarious wrong ways he had gone, the waste of his going, he sniffed a sea smell. Whirling down the window, he smelled again and let out a cry.
The ocean! Either the old geezer hadn’t understood his question or was lost himself; maybe he had suspected Levin was a Russian spy.
He beheld in the distance a golden lace of moonlight on the dark bosom of the vast sea.
Ocean in view, oh the joy. “My God, the Pacific!”
He saw himself as stout Cortez—Balboa, that is—gazing down at the water in wild surmise, both eyes moist.
Some minutes later he asked at a service station the way to Nadalee’s aunt’s place. Though it was about nine when he got there, the motel was dark, no sign lit. But Levin knocked on each cabin door until a light went on in one, and the door fell open.
There stood Nadalee in a sheer nightie.
“Mr. Levin—I mean Seymour.”
“Nadalee—I got lost.” Before he could say where or why, she had shucked off her garment and her gloriously young body shed light as he hungrily embraced it.
In the past, Dr. Fabrikant had told Levin, Professor Fairchild, to uphold standards of efficiency and purity, had locked the composition instructors—mostly ladies then—in one large classroom as they collectively graded departmental objective exams. Although with advancing age he had changed some of his ways, under Gilley other curious customs prevailed, for instance the competition among instructors and those assistant professors who taught comp, to get done with d.o. finals on the very day they were given. Gerald said he did not encourage the race for itself, though he enjoyed races, but he liked to have comp grades in well ahead of the registrar’s deadline, so he asked all possible speed in correcting papers, tallying scores, and submitting term grades. Though Levin functioned poorly in a rush, he feared being left out of things, so he raced along with the others for hours without pausing to drink or pass water.
Each exam paper consisted of two hundred short-answer questions on eight mimeographed pages, and the instructor had one hundred and fourteen students, including Grammar Z inmates, who had their own objective tests, made up by Avis. Levin hurriedly counted correct answers, making little red check marks down the margin of the page, later changing to economical dots. He totaled aloud, wrote the number of right answers at the bottom of the page and hastily flipped to the next sheet, once in a while taking a few seconds to work his fingers against cramp. He fidgeted and sweated when he heard people running up and down the stairs and hall, worrying that they might be turning in their scores while he sat with a great stack of uncorrected papers in front of him. Though the coffee room was open for business, and he thirsted for tea, he didn’t dare go in, fearing to fall farther behind. Avis was the talented one at this game and usually led the pack; at the very worst she came in second to Bullock, another speedster. Her flushed joy in victory matched Gilley’s beamish approval of her deed; he liked a winner.
Try as he would, Levin was no match for the professionals, although he began to like the competitive hurry and the pleasures of simple arithmetic; but he finished third from last. Gerald afterwards ribbed him and Farper, who had come in after him, for holding up the making of the departmental curve for an hour. This was the Bell graph of grade scores, which Gilley, according to set percentages, divided into letter grades. As each instructor had handed in his tally sheet, Gerald and Milly had transposed the figures to a master tally. When the statistics were in, the director of composition retired behind his locked office door and working with a slide rule he was fond of, carefully plotted the curve and divided it into segments, indicating the number of A’s, B’s, etc., that would be permitted. He hoped someday to have an IBM machine that would do the job, grading and all, in a jiffy. Milly then typed the statistics of the curve on a stencil, which she ran off like a newspaper extra. Gerald grabbed up these papers and strode
down the hall, handing one to each man who taught comp. Ed Purtzer, formerly a track star, distributed a pile to his colleagues on the third floor.
With this latest information, the instructors were able to inscribe letter grades on each exam paper. Once they had this done, they arrived at term marks by averaging the d.o., with class quiz, and theme averages, the latter two having been figured out during the previous week by all but the hopelessly disorganized. Levin thought the competition would end at this point, since it was late in the day, dark outside, but many of the comp people returned after supper to complete grades and transcribe them on two sets of cards so they could hand them to Milly first thing in the morning. Once all grades were in, working again from the individual tally sheets, Gilley drew a bar graph in colors to show how each man had fared in d.o. results. Avis again excelled; she had the longest red bar, signifying highest number of A’s, whereas Levin had a medium-size bar. Hers was twice as long as his, a fact that made him feel momentarily ashamed. He tried to find out who the man with the smallest red bar was, hoping to befriend him, but Gilley wouldn’t say. Later Bucket confessed it was he.
“I never teach directly for the d.o.,” he said. “These tests are distasteful to me.”
“Aha,” said Levin.
Levin found himself thinking about the girl Professor Fairchild had told him about during their meeting in August, the one who had cut her throat outside her instructor’s bedroom window. She often popped into his mind as he was running the subtle course between encouraging Nadalee not to expect very much more of their lovemaking and pretending he wasn’t. It had been a mostly happy weekend for Levin until he had left her; only then would he admit he had felt no true affection for the girl, and that was enough to undo in aftermath some of his pleasure. This reaction was an old stock-in-trade of his and did not help endear him to himself. Why he should feel
no genuine affection for Nadalee after his previous hot desire for her, he blamed to some degree on the disappointment of his trip through the mountains, and also on the fact that he had perhaps too severely previously subdued his ardency for her; or if it wasn’t exactly that, certainly affection had been overlaid with a fear that troubled him all along, not that she would slit her throat under the cherry tree in the backyard; but that if news of their affair leaked out, it would end his career at Cascadia with a backbreaking thump. Levin worried she might give them away by a changed attitude, or sign, however unconscious or unwilling, that the teacher-student relationship had shifted to something more personal. It turned out that for the remaining few days of the fall term there was no serious change in her, except that she pretended nothing had gone on between them, and Levin was afraid her pretense was visible. He also worried that someone might have seen them on the coast—Bullock and Gilley, after ducks—or that she might, humanly enough, say something to her roommate about her new boy friend—tickle me and I’ll tell you his name—a bearded member of the English department, ravished by her charms. The roommate might, in moments of passion, carelessly blow about this information, till it landed in Professor Fairchild’s lap, whose wrath Levin feared most. He wondered if the fun he had had was worth it.
But after not too long he convinced himself the girl could be discreet. She had her own reputation to protect; and suppose news of the non-paying guest got back to the aunt who owned the motel, an affront to business? Levin learned with relief that neither Gilley nor Bullock had been out for ducks that weekend. Gerald had been on a recruitment trip to high schools in North Cascadia, while the University at Gettysburg —it said in the newspaper—was working southern pastures, practically a lost cause, since most of the kids there patriotically favored the southern college. And George, according to Bucket, had been busy tutoring his athletes for the finals; he had had them working last year’s d.o’s. Yet when Nadalee,
looking most attractive, appeared in the instructor’s office one afternoon not long after their recent intimacy and suggested another fling before finals, Levin, clearing his throat, said he didn’t think it would be a good idea until maybe the Christmas or Easter holidays. He also advised Nadalee to take next term’s English 11 with another instructor, and she intelligently saw the point.
“But we will meet now and again, won’t we, Seymour?”
“Now and then,” Levin said. “We might go for walks along the river.”
She looked at him curiously. “Is something wrong? Did I do something you didn’t like?”
“Oh, no,” he said, “nothing of the sort. It’s just that we have to be very careful, I told you that.”
“Then when during Christmas will we meet? I could find an excuse to stay on at the dorm and maybe we could go to your room sometime, or something like that if it could be arranged.”
“That would be nice but I may be going to San Francisco during Christmas,” Levin said.
“Oh, swell! Wouldn’t it be nice if we could go together? I’d pay my own way, of course.”
He said it would be except he had promised a colleague he might go along with him, in the other’s car.
“Oh,” said Nadalee.
Though they talked longer, she seemed, when she left, to have grown cool to him. He observed this with regret. He was treating her badly.
A week later, two days after the English 10 final, she was in his office again, upset, angry, on the verge of tears. It was a dark mid-December morning, the rain blurring the wet world. She was herself drenched, her raincoat and poplin hat thoroughly wet, and Levin had hung them above the radiator, to dry. She had on a pair of tight red culottes, a white sweater that cuddled her hard little breasts, and white fur-trimmed boots on her childlike feet. Levin had serious second thoughts about the wisdom of so soon having called it quits with her,
and even assembled a temporary plan for reclaiming her friendship, but this, on reflection, he abandoned. Yet he felt regret for the reduction, for whatever reason, of his former interest in her, and her feeling for him. If I were only in love, he thought.
She had come, it turned out, to protest her English grade. At her request Levin had mailed Nadalee her mark ahead of the official transcript, and she was clearly unhappy with the C she had got. She said, with moist, hurt eyes, she surely deserved at least a B and accused the instructor of having leaned over backwards in grading her.
“What do you mean?”
Her voice broke. “Aren’t you punishing me because you did something you shouldn’t have?”
Levin went to the door and listened. He listened at the walls.
“Please, Nadalee, keep your voice down.”
She tightened her trembling lips as he, after a minute, spoke. “This I’ll say: your term mark had absolutely no connection-it wasn’t in any way influenced by my conscience, or any other feeling relative to our relationship, which I look back on with gratitude to you—if that’s what you mean.”
He showed her how he had worked out her grade. “First of all, we’re all directed to grade the same way in comp, one-third each for class quiz, and theme averages, plus d.o. Now, going into the final, you had B plus in themes and only C plus in quizzes. I was hoping you’d hit at least a B minus in the d.o.—I was hoping for more than that, but at least a B minus to give you a B minus average for the term, which the registrar records as a straight B because he doesn’t—as I understand it—like to monkey with plus or minuses because that means more clerical help. Anyway, to my deep disappointment—and I’m very sincere about it—you pulled a D for some strange reason, and that made your average C plus for the term, which is what I gave you, and that was the reason for the registrar’s C. I will also admit I considered raising you to a B anyway, because, as I just said, I feel a lot of gratitude to you. But the truth of
it is that what happened to us, as you must understand, has no connection with your grade and I can’t give it any. I thought it wouldn’t be fair to mark you on one standard and everyone else on another. Do you see what I mean, Nadalee?”
She gave up her struggle to conceal contempt. “I see there were things you could bring yourself to do when they suited you.”
Levin was shaken. “If that’s honestly so, and there was nothing more to it than that, then I regret it.”
She began to cry. She sat in the visitor’s chair and wept in her hands. He pulled a tissue out of his drawer but she wouldn’t take it.
“I had the curse when I took that final. I never do well then.”
“I’m sorry, Nadalee.”
“You don’t know how much this means to me. I was banking on at least a B.”
After a while she dried her reddened eyes and renewed her lips. Though he was tempted to ask her not to say or do anything rash, he managed not to. When she left she had regained a certain composure, but not Levin.
He was uncomfortable for hours in bed that night, trying to decide what to do. Had he marked her fairly? Possibly he had gone off a bit in grading her work in class, yet that might have been to her advantage as well as not. On the other hand, since she was a better than average writer in a comp course, why not raise the C plus to a B minus and let it go at that? Damn the small difference. He would not swear in the light of eternity and/or Second Law of Thermodynamics that his B minus meant a better performance than his C plus. Who was Gilley with his iron law of grade averages, God almighty?
Bullock had once said in the coffee room that he tended to upgrade the work of girls with good figures. Levin, on his part, was inclined to favor a petitioner. A student could arouse his sympathy by saying, “Look, Mr. Levin, I’m working extra hard this term. I have reformed and hope you’ll notice it.” Or by
telling him his father had recently died and the widowed mother was entirely dependent on the son’s grades. If his “objectivity” had been influenced before, why not now for her who had slept with him? He owed her more than he had owed the others.
I can’t, he thought, as he stared out into the wet night. It’s the principle of it.
He had resolved nothing. When he managed to fall asleep he woke after an hour and thought of what he had thought before.
She appeared in his office again the next day. Her pale face was without lip rouge or eyebrow pencil; and without perfume her body odor was bittersweet. She looked, Levin clearly saw, like no one he particularly knew, which he blamed on himself.
“When I spoke to you before,” she said, “I didn’t tell you why I needed the B, because I was ashamed to. But I have to have it because I found out I have flunked my math. I need the B in English to keep from being put on probation. If that happens in my first term here, Daddy said he would make me leave and go back to the bank. He’s very strict about everything, Mr. Levin.”