The Stories Of Mary Gordon Part 11

"Don't you call me baby. Ever ever again."

"Don't you be chewing out my guts because your friends let you down. I'm on your side, remember? I'll be with you in two days. I should have known better than to let you loose in the world on your own."

Her palms felt moist the way they used to all the time before she had the baby. She wondered if they'd feel like that all the time now. She kept walking up and down the sidewalk in front of the bank, then she realized she was looking conspicuous. She walked in and walked up to Martin Cunningham's desk.

"Well, Kathleen, aren't you a sight for sore eyes? How long are you home for?"

"Two weeks," she said, and she was blus.h.i.+ng. "Only, you see, Mr. Cunningham, Kevin's coming next week and I'm afraid I've overspent what he gave me to tide me over. I'm just off the phone with him, he said I could get a cash advance on the Visa."

"You can, of course," he said. "l.u.s.t hand it over, said the dodo."

She had no idea what he meant by that dodo bit. She was worried that the lie came to her so easily.

He took the card and came back with a slip for her to sign. Then he went away again and came back with five hundred pounds.

"Anything else we could be doing for you?"

"No, you're grand," she said. "Thanks."

She ran out the door before she could start worrying that he was looking at her funny.

As she drove home, she wondered how they'd make the money up. They just made it month to month, and they were careful. Maybe it meant they couldn't come over again at Christmas. Or maybe she'd get another job. Kevin was always saying she could make more money somewhere else. With her looks and her way with people. She was getting to be known in town; people knew her from church, and with the singing in Harrigan's.

She'd taken Jimmy's car and she left it in front of the B & B. Slowly, she walked the half mile to her parents' house. The nausea that began when she thought of the Visa bill grew when she smelt the heavy smell of the tomato sauce. She couldn't bear the thought of eating it. She knew what would happen. She'd walk into the kitchen and they'd give her a piece of bread dipped in the sauce. She'd cut it up into small pieces with a knife and fork and eat it slowly, piece by piece. When they asked her how it was, she'd tell them it was fantastic.

Rosecliff.

We should begin with the house, or the story of the house. Or the facts that make up part of the story of the house.

The name of the house is Rosecliff. Its location is Newport, Rhode Island.

What am I doing in Newport, Rhode Island? What am I doing looking at the mansions of Newport, Rhode Island? I who pride myself on having no interest in the habits of the wealthy, or in architecture that's overembel-lished, self-proclaiming in its tone. The answer: I am meeting a friend who is at a conference there. An old friend, and like me, brought up in the working cla.s.s. We will stay in a bed and breakfast, walk and talk, catch up.

I don't like the bed and breakfast because although my room has a four-poster bed, it doesn't have a bathtub. A working fireplace (although instead of logs, there's an artificial log wrapped in paper, ignitable at the touch of a match), but no bathtub. A stall shower. And worse: communal breakfasts, at a long mahogany table- Chippendale, I think, because of the ball and claw feet. Everyone, except for my friend and me, is part of a couple. On a pilgrimage to the unimaginable wealth of the past. They talk, without exception, about money. "CAN YOU IMAGINE WHAT THAT'D COST YOU TODAY?" They are fecund in their idioms having to do with money. "That'd set you back quite a lot." "They must have been rolling in it." "That was worth a pretty penny."

Furthermore, it's raining and we have to be out of the room at ten so that the place can be made up. It is in a spirit of anarchic churlishness that I approach the great houses, walk through the avenues of trees where water drips extravagantly from the costly leaves of horse chestnuts, copper beeches, elms.

Of the great houses, Rosecliff appeals to me most, because it's white: an a.s.set in a blinding rainstorm. Also, I'm disposed to its original owner because she has a wonderful name: Theresa Fair. And she was arriviste and unlucky. Not completely unlucky: her father discovered the Corn-stock Lode, a vein of silver worth two hundred million dollars. "Know what that'd be in today's dollars?" my breakfast partners would say.

I don't know, but it sounds like quite a lot.

Theresa Fair married Herman Oelrichs, scion of a s.h.i.+pping fortune, turned her back on the crude society of her native San Francisco, and took up the business of New York society with an avidity that must have burned like l.u.s.t. She hired Stanford White to build her Newport summer palace. Or cottage, as they were called. Stanford White: killed by a maniac for love of a floozy.

Already the substantiality of Newport is being undermined.

Theresa Fair Oelrichs and Stanford White argued about the details of the construction of Rosecliff. He'd meant it to be a copy of the Pet.i.t Trianon at Versailles, which was a pleasure palace, not a residence. Mrs. Oelrichs needed rooms for her guests. Reluctantly, White added a second story. But Mrs. Oelrichs needed rooms for her staff. White agreed to a third story, provided it would be narrow, short, and invisible. He built forty rooms, each of them only ten feet high. They must have been cubicles. They cannot be seen from the outside, because they are set back and hidden by a bal.u.s.trade. The comfort of the servants was in no one's mind.

In the Grand Ballroom, where Stanford White had commissioned a painted sky in the middle of the ceiling, Tessie Fair Oelrichs had her famous bal blanc(she was obsessed with whiteness, with the color white) in imitation of the one given by Louis XIV. All the women were told to wear white, and if their hair wasn't white, to powder it or to wear white wigs. She herself wore a headdress made of ostrich feathers and diamonds. She tried to get her friend, who was secretary of the navy, to dock some navy s.h.i.+ps outside her house. But he refused. So she had mock s.h.i.+ps built by Newport craftsmen, outlining their sails in newly invented electric light.

She doesn't seem to have been happy. Her husband, it was said, traveled a lot on business and was rarely in the house. One day, in 1920, when she was supervising some construction, perhaps in the ballroom, a piece of plaster fell from the ceiling, blinding her in one eye. She suffered a nervous breakdown, and took to her bed in Rosecliff, entertaining imaginary guests. Of her son, not much is known. She died in 1926, so the house was his during the Depression, that time that was so hard on great houses. Fortunes were lost; servants could not be hired, since their wages could not be paid. During the thirties, says our tour guide (without whom you can't see the house), the great houses were "white elephants." You could buy them, the tour guide says, "for a song." Immediately I see houses, especially the white Rosecliff, lumbering, vulnerable, loyal as old elephants, and then I see sharpsters in checkered suits putting nooses around the melancholy pachyderms' n.o.ble necks, leading them off singing something like "ja-da-ja-da-jadajada jig, jig, jig."

I don't know what condition the house was in in 1941 when Anita Niesen bought it for her daughter Gertrude's twenty-first birthday. She paid only twenty-one thousand dollars. Perhaps a thousand dollars for each year of her daughter's life. Gertrude was a cabaret singer. A nightclub singer. They were from New York.

This purchase was not a good thing for the house. Anita and Gertrude lived in the house only one season: the summer of 1941. Having spent money on the house, they couldn't afford servants to maintain it. They had a summer there alone, mother and daughter, playing house. At the end of the season, they closed the house, but they neglected to drain the pipes. They didn't arrange for proper heating. So in the winter, the pipes burst and the house was ruined by water damage. The great heart-shaped staircase, copied by Stanford White from a French original, was encased with ice. The tour guide shows us pictures.

Suddenly, I am jolted from my torpor. The torpor I always feel when I hear the word "wealth," one syllable, top-heavy, though single, over-upholstered, a soft mountain, an avalanche, the dark pulpy apple with an unfathomable center. Something about the word "wealth" overtires me. Makes me long for sleep. Or death. I don't like these big houses because they're death houses. Built by people who, like the ancient Egyptians, are choking to death on the fat of the land.

But when I hear about Anita and Gertrude, and not having money for servants, and not knowing enough to drain the pipes, I am no longer breathing the thick air of wealth.

It is the air of carelessness. The air of ruin caused by carelessness. Stupidity or lack of knowledge. I can think of nothing but the staircase encased in ice, and the fact that you can't talk about it without repeating the syllable "case." It is the case that the staircase was encased in ice.

For two years I think about the nightclub singer and her mother and the staircase encased in ice. I go to the newspaper morgue and find everything I can about Gertrude Niesen.

But I'm not really interested in Gertrude or her mother. I'm interested in the damage to the house. The damaged house. I'm not really interested in the house before or after its damage.

The shame of a damaged house. I'm interested in the house's shame, and what I believe must have been the people's lack of shame.

I want to tell the story of a damaged house, but I don't know how. I don't want to make the story an anecdote.

Or a study in the clash of social forces.

I thought of inventing a third character and telling the story from her point of view. A poor relation. A female cousin. First censorious, then shy. In love with Gertrude's father. I had thought of having her explain the father's presence in Gertrude's career and Gertrude's plan to win her father away from this poor cousin, who gave him the attention his wife and daughter would not.

I didn't know how else to explain the father's presence in the articles about Gertrude. There, he's portrayed as being initially so reluctant for his daughter to have a career in show business that she's forced to run away from home: her respectable home in Brooklyn Heights. This is the hook, with Gertrude: she's well brought up, genteel even, she went to a finis.h.i.+ng school, the Brooklyn Academy. Eventually, though, Mr. Niesen relents. He sees that talent will out, so in the later articles he's hovering, attentive, making sure the reporters get things straight. He's the detail man. Calling the coast. Making train reservations.

What I can't explain is why, since he was involved in real estate as a profession, he would have allowed his wife to buy a property she couldn't possibly maintain, why he wouldn't have told her that pipes had to be drained, that the house couldn't be left as I imagine they left it, closing the door behind them, taking a taxi to the train.

But I'm not really interested in the father. I'm interested in the damaged house. Because I think one of the things I fear most is that my carelessness or ignorance will cause a damage I could never have foreseen and can never repair.

You'd think I'd be interested in Gertrude. I always wanted to be a cabaret singer. A torch singer. Lounging like Gertrude, in smoky lounges. Gertrude's big song was "Light My Cigarette." Gertrude, the finis.h.i.+ng school chanteuse. Gertrude, born, in the photos I xerox from the morgue, to embody the word "blowsy." Short, with a bra.s.sy pageboy, overfull lips and bosom. A beauty mark, which may or may not have been penciled in. Her Russian mother. Her Swedish father, the detail man.

But what I think about is the staircase encased in ice. The ruined fabrics. The woodwork a sponge, the plaster a chalky milk. The terrible, aggressive stupidity of being careless with something that took so much time to create and maintain. The dreadfulness of how easy it is to do damage. The shamed house, like a grand lady given the pox by her philandering husband, full of tremors, marks on her face like carbuncles, like the sh.e.l.ls of snails.

Two years after I saw the house I talk to another friend about this story and what it means to me. She says: "There are some things you can't play with. They're too powerful, they always win in the end."

But, I say, it was the house that was hurt, not the people, really.

But, she responds, that kind of hurt humiliates whoever inflicted it. And besides, the house was rebuilt by another rich person.

But I don't think Gertrude and her mother suffered. I don't know why I believe that: perhaps because of Gertrude's smoky eyes, and the way she ordered her father around. And the fact that her mother sold the house at a profit. I would never have been able to sell the house. I would have been so ashamed that I would have had to live there forever, to bear witness to my carelessness, my dereliction. I wouldn't have been able to repair the house myself, or come up with the money, so I would have insisted upon my own continued presence at the center of the ruin. This is how I know that Gertrude and her mother were nothing like me. And why I'm jealous of them, and contemptuous. I believe they were incapable of suffering.

My friend and I both feel that, given damage that extensive, someone must have suffered.

But we don't know who.

If you know that there was suffering, but you don't know who suffered, how do you tell the story?

The Blind Spot.

Tom was her blind spot. Everyone knew it, everyone else could see it, of course- that's what a blind spot is, after all, something everyone else can see that you can't see. I guess we all have one. At least one. Well, Tom was Sister Bertie's, that's for sure. Sister Roberta Conlon, O.S.N. The Order of St. Norbert. That's what those initials stand for. Once thriving, now nearly extinct. Once a community of several hundred souls, now dwindled to thirty-five. A median age of seventy-six. At sixty-eight, Bertie was among the youngest.

No, you would not say the Order of St. Norbert was thriving. You would have to say that it was dying on the vine. But Sister Bertie was thriving, and everything that she touched seemed to thrive. That is, if you don't count Tom.

I met her more than thirty years ago. I think it was 1971. No, 1970: the year we invaded Cambodia. I met her on a march protesting the invasion of Cambodia. I'd never met a nun before. I'm not a Catholic. My family was Congregationalist, but there was nothing serious about our churchgoing.

I couldn't quite place what was odd about her at first; a middle-aged woman, plainly dressed, a denim skirt, a madras blouse, a cross that looked like it was made of iron in the middle of her chest. She was friendly, but without allure. I was ashamed of myself for thinking in those terms when I realized she was a nun. That was before we were friends.

But before we were friends, we were colleagues. I'd come out to Rock-ford, Wisconsin, as dean of Fisher University, a small-sized private university with a surprisingly large endowment that had its roots in the production of beer; I didn't even know there was another inst.i.tution of higher learning in the town: St. Norbert's College, a liberal arts college for women run by the Sisters of St. Norbert. Bertie was the president. She still is.

I don't think I'd moved most of the boxes out of my office when she called for an appointment. "Well, what can you do for me?" she asked. "I know that's been on your mind. Uppermost in your thoughts. That's why I'm here: to relieve you of the burden of the burning questions: what can I do for Sister Roberta? so that you can get on with your life."

It took me a while to realize that she was kidding. When she realized that, she began to laugh. "Oh, G.o.d, I'm always in trouble because people think I'm serious. My problem is that everyone takes me at my word. I'm Irish, Dr. Winthrop. You shouldn't always take me at my word."

I wanted to say, "But you're a nun."

But she beat me to the punch. "You think that's a strange thing for a nun to be saying. Don't think of me as a nun. Or, all right, I guess you have to. Think of me as an educator. Think of me as a poor relation. But there are things we can do for you over at St. Norbert's. We have things that we can provide; resources that we can share. We have, for example, a lot of land. Aren't you a little short on hockey s.p.a.ce?"

She was wrong; it wasn't hockey; it was lacrosse, but we were short on playing fields, and in exchange for their playing fields, we allowed the St. Norbert's girls to take our film courses. To use the equipment. The equipment was the main point. In all the years I've been dean, not more than ten girls from St. N.'s used the equipment. One of them did a program about Bertie, and it was shown on local television and then nominated for an Emmy. I remember something Bertie said on that show, about her religious life. I always thought it explained a lot about her. She said the point of faith wasn't that it brought certainty, but that it allowed you a place of trust.

I don't quite know what the point was to my hiring Tom in the art department. Or what the point was supposed to be. I wasn't the one she convinced, though; it was Ray Ringswold, the chairman of the department. He was the one who came into my office to tell me Tom Conlon would be a great addition to the department; it would be a feather in our cap to have an M.F.A. from Yale, someone who'd shown in New York, not recently, of course, but no one on the art faculty had even come that close.

I don't know what Bertie had done to convince Ray Ringswold that it would be a good idea to hire Tom- she was very good at convincing people of things. It wasn't just her charm, which was considerable, or the force of her character, also considerable: she had vision. Now I know that's a word people use carelessly nowadays, but Bertie really had it. Take what she did with St. N.'s. In the forties and fifties, it was a kind of finis.h.i.+ng school for future Catholic mothers; in the sixties, it had a brief hectic flush as a training ground for Catholics planning to work in the Third World; by the seventies, it was turning moribund. Bertie had thought it needed more than cosmetic surgery. Some people think she beheaded the inst.i.tution they had loved and cared for and created a whole new animal. This was her vision: St. Norbert's was going to devote itself to the education of undercla.s.s urban women. She began with her education department, offering literacy cla.s.ses in the projects; her psychology department organized a day-care center there for the mothers. Her dream was to move women (many of them were girls, although they'd had several children by the time they entered the program) from a G.E.D. right through to a B.A. On-site learning, at first, and then buses taking them to the campus. She thought it was important for working mothers to have green, and s.p.a.ce, and quiet. Foundations loved the project; she was a whiz at getting major grants. The occasional middle-cla.s.s white girl who still made her way to St. Norbert's, because of her mother's alumnae loyalty or because she couldn't get in anywhere else, either left soon or was transformed. And there were transformations among the inner-city women. "A miracle worker," people said about Bertie. They said it all the time. It made her laugh. But she couldn't work miracles on her brother Tom. Perhaps because she didn't think he needed any changing: not a bit.

I'd met him before, because there were periods when he'd live at the convent: the convent had many empty rooms; it had been built when the order was thriving; now it was like a hotel in a ghost town. Bertie had told me there were forty-five bedrooms; there were only eleven sisters living there. She wanted to bring some of the women and their children to live there, but the other sisters refused. They didn't refuse Tom, though; I guess they knew that would be going too far. Bertie could seem flexible, but when she wanted something, there was an implacability that could be a little frightening. She would say things with a laugh, but if you looked at them closely, her eyes were steel.

Bertie's explanations for Tom were extravagant, absurd: she compared him to the medieval troubadours; she compared him to St. Francis of a.s.sisi. She kept saying, "My brother is a true original. He cares nothing about money. He lives for his art." I didn't know him well enough to question what she said about his relations.h.i.+p to money and his work. Certainly, he looked poor; his clothes were thrift-shop shabby; his car was a study in rust; it worked only in some favorable climatic conditions; its failures always seemed to surprise Tom, but I don't know how he could imagine that the car would be dependable. What would you have a car for if you couldn't depend on it? I suppose that's unfair; I suppose a dependable car is a luxury of the middle cla.s.s. And Tom prided himself on not being a member of the middle cla.s.s. And Bertie was proud of that part of him.

Although I didn't find myself in a position to doubt his unworldliness or his devotion to his work, I knew enough to know he wasn't what Bertie called "an original." Anyone who'd spent any time around a major city or a major university would have met someone like Tom. One of those people who hung around after graduation, who made themselves a fixture at coffeehouses and poetry readings, still driving a taxi or waiting tables in their forties. Calling themselves artists and despising others who had sold out. Maybe some of them were good artists; I'm not in a position to know. I don't trust my own taste in art- I've learned that as a dean, dealing with some of the more creative types. My degree was in economics. But I don't want you to get the wrong idea about that. Like all I care about is money. The Board of Trustees sometimes accuses me of not paying attention to the bottom line. My dissertation was on the Ujimah villages in Tanzania; I'd learned about them when I served in the Peace Corps there. Ujimah means brotherhood. The villages were meant to be based on ancient kins.h.i.+p networks. In the beginning of my research, I thought they were a viable option; by the time I published my book, I had to name them what they were: a n.o.ble, failed experiment. Maybe I should have known better than to try the experiment of hiring Tom. But Ray Ringswold convinced me. All that feather in our caps talk, I guess, went to my head. And I couldn't have borne disappointing Bertie.

Because, unlike the rest of us, she was a person of hope. A person of hope because a person of faith; I watched her once, at a wedding. It was a Catholic Ma.s.s, and I saw her face when she prayed after communion. I would never call Bertie beautiful, but her face was s.h.i.+ning. Something happened to her when she prayed. Because she believed in it, and from it took hope. And she really loved people; she said, "Joe, I really love you," once when a project we'd worked on together came up trumps. And I believed she did.

She was something of a legend. There was the story of the woman who was going to kill her baby and herself rather than give the baby up to child welfare. She'd gone back on drugs; she was one of Bertie's failures. Bertie was in the projects one day; sometimes she taught cla.s.ses there: she said she wanted to keep an eye on things, and she liked being back "on the ground." As if she were, most of her life, somewhere else. But no one would have said of Bertie that she was "up in the air."

The police were at the door, but they were stymied. None of them wanted to take the chance with a baby's life. Bertie came up and knocked on the door, as if she were in a first-cla.s.s hotel and were stopping by to see if a friend was ready to go to luncheon.

"Janice," she said. "It's Sister Roberta. I'm here. I won't let anything happen."

"You'll let them take my baby."

"I'll take your baby," she said. "I'll keep him until you're better. Then you can get him back."

"They won't let you. They'll give him away to some foster people who'll treat him bad."

"Of course they'll let me," Bertie said. "You know me well enough by now. People always do as I say. Now just let me in and we'll talk."

The woman let her in. They talked. No one knows what they said, but Sister Roberta took the baby. She did get a family that she knew to take care of the baby. But it didn't turn out well. Janice was killed in prison. Knifed by her cellmate: a lover's quarrel. What did Bertie make of that? And whatever happened to the baby? I don't know; at least his mother didn't kill him, and at least she didn't kill herself. So that was something. "Something is better than nothing, Joe. You've got to believe that. Or you're paralyzed." Did she know how often I feel paralyzed? I never knew quite what Bertie knew.

But I know she didn't know some things about her brother. Maybe it was because he was so much younger than she; they really didn't grow up together; he was five when she left the house for the convent, and as she told me, in the years of her preparation for final vows, she wasn't allowed to see her family very much. Her parents both died while Tom was still a teenager; she was very protective of him, and very, very proud.

He got a scholars.h.i.+p to Yale. That was quite something for a family from Marion, Illinois; no one from the town had ever gone to the Ivy League. Then he stayed on for his master's in painting. He was still living in New Haven when I hired him; he worked as a janitor in an apartment building; he said it was good for his work. He said he didn't want to live in New York, didn't want to be part of the rat race. The gallery scene was a trap; it killed real art, he said. I don't know why he never showed after the first time; I suspect that his show wasn't successful, but I have no proof of that. No one keeps track of people who don't show after the first time; they just disappear. That's what I've been told by people who seem to know the business.

"My brother's a real beatnik," Bertie would say. At first I thought she was in a time warp, that she really meant hippie, but she was right- Tom's model wasn't minted in the sixties; it was a decade earlier. He carried copies of Howl in his pocket, and memorized Ferlinghetti. Kerouac was his G.o.d. He liked to hint that he'd done hard drugs, but he also liked to be vague about it. "Not just that mind candy Tim Leary was pa.s.sing out, I mean the real hard stuff," he'd say, after a drink or two. With a certain kind of student, this had real appeal. Needless to say I didn't like it. I preferred seeing him with Bertie; he didn't talk about that kind of stuff in front of her.

I wasn't the one who told him to stop referring to our female students as "chicks." It was actually Andrea who did it, very kindly, very gently- Andrea had that way about her, but I think she made her point. Andrea was another of Bertie's transformations. Or miracles, depending on which word you liked to use. She, too, was something of a local legend. She'd worked as a secretary at St. N.'s; she'd started there just after high school and never worked anywhere else. She'd married her high school sweetheart, and they had three children. But everyone knew he was a drunk. Then one night- we've all heard the details quite often, everyone in town I mean- he went after her youngest daughter. Not s.e.xually, but with a belt. And Andrea knocked him out with a frying pan. Then she sued for divorce. And he sued back, got the police to press charges against her for a.s.sault.

Bertie was the one who talked her into fighting it. She was the one who called in the press. I don't know where they came from, but there suddenly seemed to be hundreds of women who'd been abused, or felt they'd been abused by their husbands. Vince Crawford had to crawl with his tail between his legs for quite a long time. Then Andrea went back to school; first she got her B.A. from St. N.'s, then her M.A. in psychology. She worked for a while at a battered women's shelter. Then Bertie hired her as her a.s.sistant. That was when I met her- I mean really met her, not just knew her as a local cause celebre. I always found her wonderful to work with. It wasn't just that she was efficient, although she was, very, and that's always a good thing. She was efficient without being contemptuous: that's not so common. And she liked to laugh. Things would strike her funny- often it was something Bertie said- and she had a way of putting her head back so her neck was exposed; it was a winning gesture. I enjoyed it when I would meet up with her at parties. I suggested to my wife that we have her over for dinner, but my wife was adamant. "Oh, Christ, Joe, not another of your wounded birds," was what she said. She hates what she calls "professional victims." She goes ballistic over the Oprah show. She says she doesn't know what happened to good old-fas.h.i.+oned reticence. I'd never say it to my wife, but I think she's a little jealous of Andrea's daughter: she's a Rhodes scholar now. Our two have done fine- they're still finding themselves, but neither of them has done anything with college that a parent could brag about.

I would have liked to get to know Andrea better, but I know it won't happen. I think she likes seeing me when the circ.u.mstances dictate. Work or parties, is what I mean.

Am I being unfair in my suspicions that Bertie made it happen? Tom and Andrea, I mean, as a couple. She didn't lift an eyebrow over their living together, although they're not married- I can't help thinking she'd like them to make it legal, but of course we've never talked about it. I'm not close to Bertie in that way. I don't know if anybody is.

I suppose a lot of women would find Tom attractive, although I must say I find it as difficult to figure out what women think is attractive in a man as I do to determine what's a good work of art. He had a boyish quality, Tom, and I guess that goes over well with a lot of women. Brings out the mother in them. I never found him much to look at. Tall, skinny, still has all his hair; it still fell into his eyes, and he had this gesture of pus.h.i.+ng it out of his eyes that most men my age have given up. He is my age, Tom Conlon; we once discovered we were born two days apart.

He was popular with the undergraduates, male and female. I always thought it was that his work was so obvious that it was easy for them to relate to it. A couple are hanging in the college gallery: Tom's face on a female body: called Self Portrait. And one that's just the word "Why" written over and over, in different kinds of script. It's called WHYWHYWHY-WHYWHY You should have seen Bertie's face the night of Tom's opening. She kept taking me by the elbow and bringing me over to the WHYWHY-WHYWHYWHY picture. "It's the question, isn't it? He's so courageous to put it so baldly. What we all wake up thinking. What we're most of us afraid to say." I told her I was enjoying the paintings very much. "Great, Joe, it's a great thing for the university. And for the world," she said.

Her eye fell on him, and his on her; smiled at each other; they walked toward each other. I didn't hear them say anything. They just stood next to each other; he had his arm around her and she- well, the only thing to be said about it was she was beaming. I'd never realized she was so short. Standing next to her brother, his arm around her, she looked smaller than I'd ever understood her to be. The both of them looked entirely happy. I stood next to Andrea. "They're quite a pair," she said. And she looked happy, too.

Bertie moved away from Tom when the students began buzzing around him. They were standing so close to him that when he moved his arms to gesticulate (he did that a lot when he spoke) he often knocked the wine out of the students' plastic gla.s.ses. He was certainly popular with the students. I suspected it was partly because he let students determine their own grades. He often went out with them for beers. I was tempted to tell him that was a dicey proposition, but I didn't want to appear to be an old fogy. In retrospect, that was probably a mistake.

For three years, everything went fine. Tom taught his cla.s.ses; he painted his paintings; he and Andrea took a Chinese cooking course. When I saw them at parties, I thought he embarra.s.sed her sometimes; he could be loud when he'd had a bit too much to drink. One time, I thought she was looking for me to quiet him down when he was spouting off about the poison of the marketplace for artists. But I didn't say anything: I couldn't think of anything to say. In any case they seemed happy enough, and when Bertie was with them (Tom never drank in front of Bertie) they seemed like the dream of a happy family. Enviable, really. I never found my situation enviable. Occasionally, I'd look in The Chronicle of Higher Education, but there were no jobs that seemed like the risk of moving might be worth it. Besides, my wife has a real place in the community. Real estate. She does very well.

Then there was the incident with Amber Wirthman. Amber wasn't the type you'd think of as trouble; she was a weedy-looking girl with reddish blonde hair and protruding teeth. A little too long-legged, so she reminded you sometimes of a stork. Or in winter, when she wore this gray fake fur hat that she seemed devoted to, an ostrich. She was a business major with a minor in accounting. But she liked to paint; she'd taken three of Tom's cla.s.ses; she was one of his groupies, but to my mind, she didn't stand out among them.

I forgot to say that her father owns the company my wife works for. Wirthman Realtors, a division of Coldwell Banker. I always found the name confusing; as if they couldn't tell whether they were a real-estate company or a bank. I never liked jim Wirthman, and I certainly didn't like his wife, Donna. She was active in our alumni a.s.sociation; the president had once called her "one of our jewels."

So she went to the president first, and then he came to me.

"It seems there's a problem with one of the faculty," he said.

This is never a sentence a dean likes to hear. But I'd been a dean long enough to know there was no sense in panicking. Students were easily disgruntled, and in the current climate- education as a consumer good- they felt ent.i.tled to complain.

"Tom Conlon," the president said.

What did I feel when I heard that name? I have to admit: at first I was glad that it wasn't a faculty member I was really fond of. Then I thought of Bertie, and I dreaded hearing the details.

"It's old-man s.e.x, of course. But it's always s.e.x or money, isn't it joe?" The president liked adopting a men-of-the-world conspiratorial tone with me; he usually did it when he was going to pa.s.s me the buck. Or a particularly steamy, stinking mess.