Grace (18 page)

“It’s yourself you’re thinking of, not Giselle,” Sally says.

He walks over to the bed. “I told you, Sally, I don’t believe in divorce.” He sits down. “Not when there are children,” he says. He sounds tired, wrung dry by the need to say this again.

“And you think it is better for children to live in a house where there are unhappy parents?”

“I don’t know, but I can tell you this for sure. I would have given anything to have lived in the same house with my parents, whether they were fighting or not. You can’t tell me you wouldn’t have wanted the same. I knew the difference when they left. You said a hole was left in your brother when your father died? Well, a hole was left in me when my parents left. And my aunt was kind to me. God knows, rest her soul, she did everything to please me, but it was not the same. I wanted my parents home, where I was living, or where they were. I wanted them with me—my mother
and
my father. You can’t tell me your life was easy without your parents.”

“It’s not the same thing. My father was dead, my mother was ill.”

“But it felt the same way, didn’t it? You felt their absence, didn’t you?”

“Giselle will know we aren’t happy.”

“Not if we hide it from her.”

“Are you saying we should live a lie?”

“I am saying we should be good parents.”

“I want more than that, Justin.”

“Passion is an illusion, Sally.”

“And this? This?”

“This banal, boring existence? Is that what you want to say, Sally? Yes, this is reality.”

“If this, what we have, is reality, then I want the illusion.”

He feels the heat in his head before the words reach his tongue. “It is the illusion that got you in trouble, Sally, when you believed Jack the Enforcer was a knight in shining armor.”

She runs to the bathroom and bangs the door shut. Justin sleeps in the den.

They send an emissary. So Justin is led to believe. In the morning, before first period, when he is sitting in his office reviewing his class notes, she knocks on his door. He gets up to greet her. It is a woman he likes and respects. Helen Clumly. A feminist, or they say she is, but he thinks she is one so accidentally, falling into the role the way his father had when he became an icon for a movement he did not understand.

She is a historian. She has written a dissertation on an analysis of the history of women’s movements in the Third World, examining their commonalties with Western feminist movements. The paper she presented at the International Women’s Conference in South Africa was entitled
Are We Really so Different?
Overnight it made her the darling of feminists—white, black, Asian, Latina.

Her dissertation was published and soon journals were begging
for her articles, publishers vying with each other for the rights to her next book, conventions seeking her out to be their keynote speaker. Now she breathes that heady, rarified air at the top of the Ivory Tower that Justin thinks sooner or later will become impossible for her to live without. Yet she stays at their small, public inner-city college. The attraction it holds for her baffles her agent, but it does not baffle Justin. Both he and she are members of a secret society: professors who at heart are simply scholars, content to spend their days in the dusty stacks of research libraries but find themselves thrust into the limelight by politics.

This, Justin knows, is by no means an accurate description of himself, but the fact remains that if not for that placement test committee, if not for that teenager unable to read his father’s poetry, he would have remained where he was, in New England, in an Ivy League college, teaching predominantly white students and doing research on arcane subjects that nobody cares about. As it is, in two weeks, he will be delivering a paper at a national conference in Atlanta on combating illiteracy among inner-city youths with plays by Shakespeare.

But he is not in the limelight. Helen Clumly is in the limelight. She is the celebrity swept away by political forces: one that would canonize her for her research on women of color, the other because she also speaks for them, because she is one of them. Her college in Brooklyn meets their requirements: The students are overwhelmingly black and female, the politics sufficiently left wing.

“I’ve been asked to ask you—” she says. Her body is stiff, her voice terse. He braces himself.

“Who has asked you to ask me?” He does not let her finish.

“It does not matter.”

“And whatever it is he or she wants you to ask me, why can’t he or she ask it himself or herself?”

Helen repeats, “I have been asked to ask you.” She pauses and looks up at him. “Will you let me finish?’

“Go on.”

“Whether or not you told Mark Sandler that Sylvia Plath gassed herself over a man.”

So that is it. Somehow, somebody has told her.

“Over, as in top of?” he says, trying to buy time, to diffuse the tension with a joke. She is, after all, a friend. They dated briefly when he first joined the faculty. She is a pretty woman, fine-boned, short, with Elizabeth Taylor blue eyes and a mass of blond curls that frame her tiny face.

“You know,” she says, “I think I made a big mistake about you.”

“Come on, Helen. You don’t think I meant anything by that quip? I was being a wise-ass.”

“Yes, that you are.”

“If it means something to you, then I apologize. Okay, I am sorry I was insensitive.”

“Then let me cut to the chase.”

“This sounds serious.”

“It is serious. There has been a complaint made about what you said to Mark Sandler.”

“A complaint?”

“Did you say that, Justin? Did you tell Mark that Sylvia Plath gassed herself over … because of a man?”

“Mark is the only one who can corroborate what I said. What did Mark tell you?”

“I suppose you know he is in the hospital.”

“Yes. I went to see him.”

“Then you know how serious this is?”

“It’s unfortunate, Helen. Sad. Poor Mark.”

“Don’t you feel in any way responsible?”

“For what?”

“For what you said.”

“Look, Helen, I didn’t give him Sylvia Plath to read. He saw it in my office and picked it up. I’d think those feminists would have thought well of me for having that book in my office.”

“We know who gave it to you. That is not the issue.”

“Issue? Are we now talking about issues? What issue?”

“We know Carol Taylor gave you the book.”

“Then you know I am not responsible.” He stands up. “Christ! What garbage are you having me say! No one is responsible. Mark has emotional problems. If anyone is responsible, it is all of us for not seeing that he needed help.”

“He confides in you. He is taking an independent course with you.”

“But that does not make me his counselor.”

“God, you have become callous.”

Justin sits down. “I am not callous. I will talk to Mark. I like him. I’ll talk to him about getting help.”

“The hospital has already done that. You have caused enough trouble.”

“And what precisely do you mean by that?”

“Mark’s girlfriend, his ex-girlfriend, said that just before Mark turned on the gas in the oven, he called her. He told her that he was reading Sylvia Plath’s poems. He said ‘Professor Peters said Sylvia Plath gassed herself over a man.’ Those were the exact words Mark said to Sandra.”

If he can say a poem changed a teenager’s life, if he acknowledges that his father’s poetry had this effect on a thirteen-year-old boy, then why not this, what Helen Clumly seems to be implying? No, he will not allow himself to think this way.

“And what is Sandra’s professional expertise? Mind reader? Seer? Clairvoyant?” He covers up his discomfort with an accusation of his own.

“She … Sandra believes that Mark would never have done a thing like that had you not put that thought in his head.”

“You know her? You know this Sandra?”

“That is irrelevant. What is relevant is what you have done. You don’t feel badly, do you? You don’t know how you have upset her. You’ve made her think she drove Mark to it.”

“Who are we talking about now, Mark or Sandra? Am I to be responsible for her, too?”

“She is very, very upset. I had to take her to the doctor.”

“So you know her well.”

“She had to take tranquilizers to keep from shaking.”

“She called you?”

Helen does not answer the question directly. “She filed a complaint.”

“Do you know both of them?”

“Sandra was my student.”

“You knew the nature of the relationship between Mark and her?”

“We talked.”

“Do you know Mark suspects she has another lover? A woman. He told me that at the hospital.”

Helen lowers her eyes and jabs her finger on the surface of his desk. “Look,” she says, striking the desk again, “ the point is
thatyou
put that idea in Mark’s head.”

“Do you know it is a woman she is having an affair with?” Justin repeats the question.

“What does it matter? What difference does it make if she is, was having an affair with a woman?”

He misses the shift in tense. “It matters a great deal to a man,” he says. “To his masculinity.”

“Shit,” says Helen. “You can think about masculinity in a situation like this?”

“It was a big blow to Mark.”

“And what about Sandra? You don’t seem to realize what you have done. Sandra is a very fragile girl. She feels guilty. She feels she was responsible.”

“You’d prefer me to feel responsible, is that it?”

“You are. You filled his head with all that stuff.”

Justin gets up. “I think you should leave, Helen. We’re
wasting each other’s time. I have papers to grade, a class to teach. I think you’re being absurd, and you know you are. You can’t pin what happened to Mark on me. Or how what’s-her-name—”

“Sandra,” Helen says.

“—or on how Sandra is dealing with it, for that matter. You are smarter than that. You won’t convince me of whatever it is that your department has concocted. Mark needs help, professional help.”

She turns to leave and then pauses at the door. This is not the end of the matter, she tells Justin. I am going to take it seriously.

Three things strike Justin when Helen leaves: one, she seems to know Sandra very well; two, she seems to be more concerned about her than she is about Mark; three, she seems reluctant to identify the person who sent her to him. Her last words to him were that she, not the chair of the department, was going to take “it” seriously.

Perhaps there has been no complaint made against him. Perhaps Helen was sent by her department to test him, to smoke him out. It is known, after all, that she is a friend. But, perhaps, though he cannot formulate a reason why, it is she, Helen, who wants to find out what he knows.

When he runs into the chair later in the day, he decides to take a chance and test his suspicions. He is clever. He does not ask about Plath. Instead he asks her a question about Hughes: Does she think he was as good as the critics say? The chair, an imposing brown-skinned woman with a graying close-cropped
Afro, chuckles. “Coming into the modern age, are you, Justin?” But she answers his question. “Yes, he was a good poet,” she says, “but he became more famous when his wife died. You do know he was unkind to her, don’t you?” She does not give Justin the slightest indication that she has any gripe against him. Helen is still on Justin’s mind when he calls the hospital. He cannot speak to Mark, he is told. Mark is resting. Mark should be more alert tomorrow. Justin believes that the person who tells him this is not speaking the truth. The pause between his request to speak to Mark and the answer is far too long. He thinks someone has given the hospital instructions to keep him away from Mark. He thinks that someone is Helen.

He has more than he can handle when Anna calls. She came, as she had promised, and, as she had done the night before, she left soon after he arrived.

“I think you will do well with an early night tonight,” she said to Sally as she was leaving, and Justin bristled at the proprietary tone she seemed to feel at liberty to use even in his presence.

But Sally does in fact complain of being tired and takes to her bed.

“I am worried about Sally,” Anna says when she calls. Justin is grading papers in the den. Sally does not hear the phone in the bedroom. Justin has turned off the ringer. “What about?” he asks.

“We don’t have to play games, Justin,” she says. “I know what is going on. I know you and Sally are having problems.”

“Then you understand that whatever is the matter, it concerns
only
my wife and me.” He emphasizes
only.

“I am her friend,” Anna says.

“That is all you are, Anna.”

“Justin, I know you don’t like me,” Anna begins, pauses, takes a deep breath and continues, “but Sally likes me and so does Giselle.”

“Yes?”

“And Sally is unhappy.”

He wants to end the conversation. Sally’s happiness is not her business. “I don’t want to be rude,” he says, “but this has been a difficult day for me.”

“I want to help.”

“You’ve helped enough.”