The End of the Road (3 page)

Pleasantries were made about my being so eager to join the faculty that I came a day early to my interview. The Committee took a lively interest in one another’s summer activities. There was joshing. Applicants for jobs at the Wicomico State Teachers College were obviously not so numerous that such meetings of the Appointments Committee were but a dull addition to the members’ regular duties.

“You can count on Miss Banning’s support for your application, Mr. Horner,” Dr. Carter chortled. “She needs new victims to show off her mustache-cup collection to.”

“Oh?” said I. This remark of Dr. Carter’s was addressed not
to
me, but through me, as a grandmother teases her daughter by speaking to her grandchild.

“I have a simply marvelous collection, Mr. Horner,” Miss Banning declared good-naturedly. “You’ll surely have to see it. Oh dear, but you don’t have a mustache, do you?”

All laughed. I observed that Joe Morgan
did
have a mustache.

“Ethel’s been after me for fourteen years to grow one!” Dr. Schott guffawed at me. “Not a trim little affair like Joe’s, mind you, but a great bushy one, so I can try out her collector’s items! Now don’t you start on Mr. Horner, Ethel!”

Ethel was poised to make a retort, in all good humor, but Joe Morgan pleasantly interjected a question about my academic experience.

“Do I understand you’re from Johns Hopkins, Mr. Horner?”

“Yes, sir.”

The others nodded approval at Joe’s getting so tactfully down to business. He was a find, was Mr. Morgan. He’d not stay in their little circle long. Serious attention was focused on me.

“Oh, please, not
sir!”
Dr. Carter protested. “We don’t stand on ceremony out here in the provinces.”

“No indeed!” Dr. Schott agreed benignly. There ensued some twenty minutes of unsystematic interrogation about my graduate study and my teaching experience—the latter, except for occasional tutoring jobs in Baltimore and a brief night-school class at Johns Hopkins, being nil.

“What made you decide to get back into teaching, Mr. Horner?” Dr. Carter asked. “You’ve been away from it for some time, I presume.”

I shrugged. “You know how it is. You don’t feel just
right
doing other things.”

All acknowledged the truth of my observation. “Then too,” I added casually, “my doctor recommended that I go back to teaching. He seems to think it’s the thing I’m best at, and the thing that’s best for me.”

This was well said. My examiners were with me, and so I expatiated.

“I seem never to be content with ordinary jobs. There’s something so—so
stultifying
about working only for pay. It’s—well, I hate to use a cliché, but the fact is that other jobs are simply unrewarding. You know what I mean?”

They did know what I meant.

“You take a boy—bright kid, alert kid, you see it at once, but never been exposed to
thinking,
never been in an environment where intellectual activity was as common as eating or sleeping. You see a fresh young mind that’s never had a chance to flex its muscles, so to speak. Maybe he can’t speak good English. Never
heard
good English spoken. Not his fault. Not wholly his parents’ fault. But there he is.”

My audience was most receptive, all except Joe Morgan, who regarded me coolly.

“So you start him off. Parts of speech! Subjects and verbs! Modifiers!
Complements!
And after a while, rhetoric. Subordination! Coherence! Euphony! You drill and drill, and talk yourself blue in the face, and all the time you see that boy’s mind groping, stumbling, stretching, making false steps. And then, just when you’re ready to chuck the whole thing—”

“I know!” Miss Banning breathed. “One day, just like all the rest, you say the same thing for the tenth time—and
click!”
She snapped her fingers jubilantly at Dr. Schott. “He’s got it!
Why, there’s nothing to it!
he says.
It’s plain as day!”

“That’s what we’re here for!” Dr. Schott said quietly, with some pride. “That’s what we all live for. A little thing, isn’t it?”

“Little,” Dr. Carter agreed, “but it’s the greatest miracle on God’s green earth! And the most mysterious, too.”

Joe Morgan would not have committed himself on the matter, I believe, but that Dr. Carter addressed this last reflection to him directly. Cornered, Morgan made a sucking noise in the left side of his mouth, to express sympathetic awe before the mystery.

“I sometimes compare it to a man making fire with flint and steel,” I said calmly to Joe Morgan, knowing I was hitting him where he lived. “He strikes and strikes and strikes, but the tinder lies dead under his hands. Then another strike, not a bit different from the rest, and there’s your fire!”

“Very apt,” Dr. Carter said. “And what a rewarding moment it is, when a student suddenly becomes
ignited!
There’s no other word for it: positively
ignited!”

“And then you can’t hold him back!” Dr. Schott laughed, but as one would laugh at a sudden beneficence of God. “He’s like a horse that smells the stable up the lane!”

There were reminiscent sighs. Certainly I had scored a triumph. Joe Morgan brought the conversation back to my qualifications for a minute or two, but it was plainly in the nature of an anti-climax. The other members of the Committee showed very little interest in the interrogation, and Dr. Schott began to describe very frankly the salary scale in Maryland state colleges, the hours I’d be expected to work, non-teaching duties, and the like.

“Well, you’ll hear from us soon,” he concluded, rising and shaking my hand. “Maybe tomorrow.” I shook hands all around. “Shall I show you the back door this time?” He explained jovially my departure of the day before.

“No, thanks. My car’s out front this time.”

“Good, good!” Dr. Carter said heartily, for no reason whatever.

“I’m going out that way,” Joe Morgan said, falling in beside me. “I live just down the block.” He accompanied me across the driveway to my car, and even stood beside the front fender while I got inside and closed the door. I started the engine, but delayed putting the car in gear: apparently my colleague-to-be had something on his mind.

“Well, be seeing you around, Horner,” he grinned, shaking hands with me again through the open window.

“Sure.”

We released hands, but Joe Morgan still leaned against the car door, his face radiating cheerful candor. He was well tanned from his stay at camp, and had a marked Boy Scout look about him, a healthiness that suggested early rising, a nutritious diet, and other sorts of virtue—to be specific, patriotism, courage, self-reliance, strength, alertness, moral straightness, trustworthiness, loyalty, helpfulness, friendliness, courtesy, kindness, obedience, cheerfulness, thrift, bravery, cleanliness and reverence. His eyes were clear.

“Say, were you making fun of me in there?” he asked cheerfully. “With that flint-and-steel nonsense?”

I smiled and shrugged, very much embarrassed at being thus confronted. “It seemed like a good thing to say at the time.”

My colleague laughed briskly. “I was afraid you’d gone out on a limb with that line of horseshit, but it looks like you know what you’re doing.”

Clearly he was unhappy about it nonetheless, but wasn’t going to voice his criticisms.

“We’ll see about that pretty soon, I guess.”

“Well, sure hope you get the job,” he said, “if it’s what you want.”

I put the car in reverse and eased out the clutch. “Be seeing you.”

But there was a point still unsettled in Joe Morgan’s mind. His face mirrored faithfully whatever was in progress behind it, and even as the car began to move backwards out of the parking space I saw a question settle itself with visible finality on his pellucid brow.

“Say, we’d like to have you over to dinner—Rennie and I—before you go back to Baltimore, whether you get the job or not. I understand you’ve taken a room in town.”

“Oh, I’ll be around for a while, I guess, either way. Nothing special on the agenda.”

“Swell. How about tonight?”

“Well—better not.” It seemed the thing to say.

“Tomorrow night?”

“Sure, I guess so.”

There was another thing, dinner invitations aside: “Say, you know, if you weren’t just being funny about that flint-and-steel, then you might as well lay off it, don’t you think? There’s nothing silly about working with the Scouts that I can see. You can tease me about them, or you can argue with me about them, but there’s no sense just poking fun to be malicious. That’s too easy.”

This speech surprised me; I immediately labeled it bad taste, but I must admit that I felt ashamed, and at the same time I appreciated the subtlety with which Morgan had precluded any protest on my part by prefacing his reproof with a dinner invitation. He was still smiling most cordially.

“Excuse me if I offended you,” I said.

“Oh hell, no offense! I’m not really touchy, but what the hell, we’ll probably be working together; might as well understand each other a little. See you tomorrow for dinner, then. So long!”

“So long.”

He turned and strode cleanly across the lawn, grown tall in the students’ absence. Apparently Joe Morgan was the sort who heads directly for his destination, implying by his example that paths should be laid where people walk, instead of walking where the paths happen to be laid. All very well for a history man, perhaps, but I could see that Mr. Morgan would be a fish out of water in the prescriptive grammar racket.

A TURNING DOWN OF DINNER DAMPED, IN WAYS SUBTLE PAST KNOWING,
manic keys on the thin flute of me, least pressed of all, which for a moment had shrilled me rarely.

It began with Laocoön on the mantelpiece, his voiceless groan. The set of that mouth was often my barometer, told me the weight of day; on Wednesday after my interview, when I woke and consulted him with a happening glance, his pain was simply Bacchic! That was something, now! Out of bed I sprang, unclothed, to put a dance on the phonograph while the spell should last. Against all of Mozart I owned a single Russian dance, a piece of
Ilya Mourometz,
measured and sprightly, lively and tight—there, now, Laocoön!

The dusty maple incandesced; sunshine fired the speckled windows and filled my room with a sparkle of light, and I danced like an unfurred Cossack, spinning and jumping. Once in a blue moon I felt that light—sweet manic!—and it lasted a scant three minutes, till a ring from the phone dispersed it.

I shut off the music, furious. A man with so short time to prance deserved a history of unanswered phones. “Hello?”

“Hello, Jacob Horner?” It was a woman, and I felt naked as I was.

“Yes.”

“This is Rennie Morgan, Joe Morgan’s wife. Say, I think Joe already asked you over for dinner tonight, didn’t he? I just called to make it official.”

I allowed a pause to lie along the line.

“I mean, after your interview, you know, we wanted to make sure you’d come on the right day!

“Jacob? Are we still connected?”

“Yes. Excuse me.” I was checking my barometer, Laocoön, who now looked dolorous enough. Batygh the Tartar had breathed on us.

“Well, it’s all set, then? Any time after six-thirty: that’s when we put the kids to bed.”

“Well, say, Mrs. Morgan, I guess—”

“Rennie.
Okay? My name’s Renée, but nobody calls me that.”

“—I guess I won’t be able to make it tonight after all.”

“What?”

“No, I’m pretty sure I can’t. Thanks a lot for inviting me.”

“But why not? Are you sure you can’t make it?”

Why not? Bitch of an Eagle Scout’s
Hausfrau,
you spoiled my first real manic in a month of Sundays! I spit on your dinner!

“I’d kind of planned on riding up to Baltimore this afternoon, have a look around. Something came up.”

“Oh, now, aren’t you just getting out of it? Come on and say so; we’re not committed to each other.” This from a wife? “Don’t be a chicken—it doesn’t make a damn to us if you don’t like us.”

So caught,
flagrante delicto,
I flushed and sweated. What was this beast
honesty
ridden by a woman? An answer was awaited: I heard Joe Morgan’s wife breathing in my naked ear.

Very discreetly I hung up the phone. Not only that: I walked the first three steps away on tiptoe before I realized what I was doing, and blushed again to notice it.

Ah, well, the spell was broken, and I knew better than to try Glière and his
Ilya Mourometz
again. He’s the fizz that makes the collins bright, is Glière, but he’s not the vodka; these manics can’t be teased or dickered with. Now I was not only unmanic, I was uncomfortable.

And resentful! There’s something to be said for the manic-depressive if his manics are really manic; but me, I was a placid-depressive: a woofer without a tweeter was Jake Horner. My lows were low, but my highs were middle-register. So when I’d a real manic on I nursed it like a baby, and boils plague the man who spoiled it! That was one thing. More’s the damage to have it suggested, and by a woman, that my honesty was flagging. Can a man stomach it? That it was a fact was beside the point. Great heavens, Morgans, the world’s not
that
easy!

Even as I was dressing, the telephone rang again, with a doggedness that bespoke Mrs. Morgan. In a moment of lewdness (for I was pulling up my trousers at the time) I considered allowing that beskirted Diogenes to address her quest to my bare backside—but I let the moment go. Rennie, girl, said I to myself, I am out; be content that I don’t commit a lewdness with your voice, since you’ve aborted my infant manic. Ring away, girl scout: your quarry’s not in his hole.

Later that morning I drove the thirty miles from Wicomico to Ocean City, there to fry my melancholy in the sun and pickle it in the ocean. But light and water only made it blossom. The beach was crowded with human beings whose reality I found myself loath to acknowledge; another day they might have been as soothingly grotesque as was my furniture, but this day they were merely irritating. Furthermore, perhaps because it was a weekday, there was not a girl on the beach worth the necessary nonsense involved in a pickup. Only a forest of legs ruined by childbirth; fallen breasts, potbellies, haggard faces, and strident voices; a rats’ nest of horrid children, as unlovely as they were obnoxious. When one is not in the spirit of it, there are few things less diverting than a public beach.