House of Windows Page 9

  I don't want to relive that hour. While it wasn't the worst thing that happened after Ted died—not by a long shot—it may have been the most painful. I sat watching him try to deliver Ted's eulogy, up at the front of the church in the new black suit I'd taken him out to buy two days before. Almost from the moment he began, with his account of how Ted hadn't wanted to read when he was boy, but Roger had made him, he'd insisted, because he'd known how important it would be to his son—and I could see him struggling not to cry and failing, I was thinking, Don't do it, honey, it's too much. That's okay. Sit down and this can be over and I won't do anything like this again, I swear. When he tried to recite that Houseman poem . . . . Once the service was over, I tried to get him back to the apartment as quickly as I could, but that was more difficult than it sounds. Despite everything, Roger insisted on staying at the church to greet and talk to the people who'd attended the service. He had that sense of obligation. I stood by his side throughout, watching the looks on people's faces as they realized they'd have to say something to Roger before they could leave. A number snuck out while he was in conversation with Benedict, who must have spent a good ten minutes trying to console Roger by explaining Four Quartets to him. Finally, I succeeded in guiding him from the church to the car. I drove. As we were buckling our seatbelts, Roger said, "I believe those who came found the service quite moving." He leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. "Thank you, dear." I swear, it was like the punchline to some awful joke. I pulled out of the parking lot and headed for home. As we passed Belvedere House, Roger turned to look at it. I half-expected him to say something, offer another quotation, but he was silent.

  That night, Roger went to bed fairly early—the service had done that much for him, anyway, tired him out—while I sat up watching TV. If the afternoon had exhausted Roger, it had left me wired, on edge. There was a Twilight Zone celebration on the Sci Fi Channel, hour after hour of black and white weirdness framed by Rod Serling's laconic pronouncements. I switched between that and the cooking channel, a succession of would-be eccentric chefs taking you through the world's cuisines a half-hour at a time. Every now and again, I'd stand up to use the bathroom or rake through the refrigerator. I wasn't especially hungry; it was seeing all that food.

  As I was leaning over with the refrigerator door open, trying to decide if I really wanted to open the tub of veggie dip and the bag of baby carrots, I heard Roger say, "And when you die, may you know fitting torment." At the same time, I realized someone was standing behind me. I hadn't heard any footsteps; I'd been too distracted by my memory. I was just aware of someone there, the way you are sometimes—like when you know there's a student standing outside your office. Of course I assumed it was Roger. I said, "Midnight snack, anyone?" and, when he didn't reply, stood up and turned around.

  The kitchen was dark. The whole apartment was dark. For a second or two, my eyes were dazzled by the refrigerator's light and all I could see was a great white blotch on top of a great black blotch. I blinked, and the blotches started to break apart and resolve into a more coherent picture—and I saw the figure standing behind me. Even with the refrigerator light shining on it, it was dark, but it was tall, taller than Roger. My heart jumped and so did I, back into the fridge. Its contents clattered and crashed. A blast of cold—ice cold, much colder than the fridge—blew over me. I put one hand over my mouth. For an instant—not a second, less time than that—I saw this black shape, and then my vision cleared and it was gone.

  I ran straight for the bedroom. I didn't close the refrigerator door behind me, and I certainly didn't stop to turn off the TV. No, I threw myself into bed beside Roger and huddled as close to him as I could. I didn't move from that spot for the rest of the night. I didn't say anything to Roger, either, even when he complained about the fridge having been left open all night. In the morning, with sunlight pouring in through the windows, what had been absolutely real a few hours before seemed much less substantial. The dark shape I'd seen standing behind me appeared the product of too little sleep and too much Twilight Zone than it did—well, of what? A supernatural experience? A ghostly visitation?

  Frightening as that momentary encounter was, I worked to put it out of my mind. Together with what I'd seen when I'd lost the baby, it didn't seem to say too much good about the state of my mental health, and that was a truly terrifying prospect. It wasn't till later, when things at Belvedere House had slid from bad to worse, that I recalled it.

  The week following Ted's memorial service brought a call from Steven asking if he could talk to me about Roger. There had been some complaints from a few of Roger's students, and Steven wanted to speak with me to get a sense of how Roger was doing. "What complaints?" I asked him, and he told me. As I listened to him try to phrase the students' grievances in as non-confrontational a way as possible—you know Steven—I saw Roger standing in front of the church. When he asked me how Roger was managing, I said, "He hasn't seemed that bad to me—all things considered—but I think he's been keeping a lot to himself. You're probably right that most of the students just resent having to work—but the rest may be onto something."

  "I see," Steven said, and his voice told you he was already dreading the prospect of confronting Roger. He said, "I have a meeting with Roger scheduled this afternoon to discuss these complaints; I'm sure we'll be able to resolve this, then. Thanks for your help."

  They had their meeting, but it didn't solve anything. Roger told me about it over dinner. He was angry, the most inflamed I'd seen him since Ted's death. "Apparently, some of my students are unhappy with me," he said.

  "Oh?"

  "They feel I am being derelict in my responsibilities. A number of them have complained to the Chair."

  "Really?"

  Roger nodded. "He asked if he could speak with me this afternoon—if he could 'schedule a meeting' with me. It used to be, if the Chair wanted to talk to you, she came to your office and talked to you. 'Schedule a meeting.'"

  "What'd Steven say?"

  "Not much of any consequence," Roger said. "I swear, that man could be a lawyer, he parses his words so. There are students who feel I have been neglecting to give them my full attention; they claim I've been repeating myself; that I don't know what novel the class is supposed to be reading; that I have missed class."

  "Well," I said, "for the sake of argument, is there anything to their accusations?"

  "Nothing whatsoever," Roger said. "I grant I occasionally repeat a point made in a previous class in order to establish a connection between what I said then and what I am saying now. And, from time to time, I have devoted a certain portion of my lecture to a novel other than the one currently under consideration, but that has been solely in the interest of establishing a link between that other text and the present one. As for missing class: if I have failed to be present for one or two classes here and there, it has been because I had become absorbed in trying to settle a problem raised by the novel we were reading, and time escaped me."

  "Honey," I said, "you have been under a lot of stress since Ted died."

  "Which means what?" Roger asked. "That you believe these charges? You were my student. You know first hand what I am like in front of a class. Did you find me irresponsible?"

  "You know how much I respect you," I said. "You know you're the best professor that department—that school has. There's no question. But you've suffered a terrible loss, and that's bound to affect you. There's nothing wrong with that."

  Roger wouldn't have any of it. Although he'd admitted that all the student charges were essentially true, he couldn't see that. Steven had floated the possibility of Roger taking a few weeks off—the rest of the semester, if he wanted—which Roger had declined with his full measure of scorn. As far as he was concerned, the matter was closed; although he resented what he perceived as my questioning him. We ate dinner that night in silence, and spent the rest of the night and the next morning that way, too. Roger left for school earlier than usual—making a passive-aggressive point.<
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  Once he was at SUNY, though, it was more of the same. The students were filing into Steven's office two and three at a time, now. One tried to approach Roger directly, at the end of class, about the two papers she'd submitted that he still hadn't returned, and he lost it. He spent ten minutes going up one side of her and down the other. He didn't mention this to me. I heard it from Steven, who called me after the student's mother, understandably furious, had called him and reamed him out for half an hour. He'd tried to locate Roger—as had the student's mother before him—but Roger was nowhere to be found. After castigating the student, he'd walked out of the building headed for parts unknown. (No doubt, he'd returned to Belvedere House.) "I'm afraid Roger's behavior is becoming a bit of a problem," Steven said. I could picture him wincing at having to be so direct.

  "I don't know what to tell you," I said. "I tried talking to him about it, and it didn't go over too well. I think he knows he's in trouble; he just doesn't know what to do about it."

  "Well," Steven said, "this student's mother was going to call the Dean, next. I may have talked her out of it; if not, Roger could have a lot more to deal with."

  Actually, Steven hadn't talked the woman out of anything. After I hung up, the phone rang again and it was the Dean, looking for Roger. She was not happy. She said she expected Professor Croydon in her office at eight-thirty tomorrow morning. I said I'd tell him, and she hung up. When he returned home that afternoon, Roger didn't breathe a word of the day's events. I kept waiting for him to confess, to offer his take on the morning, however distorted by self-justification, but nothing—not a word. I tried to wait him out, but finally, as we were getting ready for bed, I cracked and told him the Dean was expecting him in her office first thing in the morning.

  "Can't," he said. "I teach then."

  "I think she's arranged for someone to cover it for you."

  "Has she?" Roger's cheeks flushed.

  "That's what she told me," I said. "Is there anything you want to say to me?"

  "No," Roger said, and that was that. I was so angry with him. I mean, I was his wife. I was the one he was supposed to talk to about things like this. But no—ever since I'd suggested his students might have a point, I'd become a member of the opposition. Fine. If this was the way he wanted things, this was the way things would be. Let the Dean try talking to him.

  She did, but not in her office. Roger didn't keep their appointment. He went to his class and ordered the adjunct Steven had found to cover it out. It didn't take long for the Dean to learn what he'd done. She was waiting for him outside the room at the end of class. I don't know what Frances said to him, but you can bet she didn't pull any punches. Roger wasn't cowed. Things turned ugly pretty much immediately.

  The call from the President's office took longer than I expected. One of the adjuncts I was friendly with sent me an e-mail about Roger and the Dean. I read it while I was still at Penrose, and was positive I'd find a message from someone higher-up in the Administration waiting for me on the answering machine when I got home. There wasn't, which made me nervous. I knew the Dean well enough to be sure there was no way she was going to let Roger's behavior to his student—and to her—go unpunished. Roger might have a bookshelf full of books and articles, but that only buys you so much. Needless to say, Roger didn't tell me anything about his confrontation with the Dean. I didn't tell him about the e-mail I'd received. We sat watching The News Hour, filling the time before bed with idle chatter. What a pair, right?

  His behavior was more and more a mystery. I knew he was motivated by pride—Roger ranked his teaching equal with his scholarship, and to come right out and say that he was falling down on the job was an affront to decades of accomplishment. I knew that fear was driving him, too. He'd already had so much taken away from him, starting with his parents and continuing through Ted. The prospect of his career joining his list of losses must have been terrifying. I could understand how the combination of ego and anxiety would cause him to reject Steven's approach. I could even understand how it would cause him to reject mine. I didn't like it, but I understood it. What I couldn't understand was what he thought he was doing with the Dean. Roger was very conscious of position, which grew out of his sense of his own in the department and on campus. Whatever he thought of the Administration and its representatives in private, in public he always did his best to stay on good terms with them. For him to ignore a meeting with the Dean, and then to argue with her in public—especially someone as full of herself as Frances—it went against everything he'd done previously. It was a deliberate slap in the face, an invitation to disaster.

  In retrospect, I think that's exactly what he was doing. Here was Roger's fatalism in action. He knew that things were bad. How much he knew, how bad he thought they were, isn't important. What is is that he recognized their badness, and decided that there was nothing he could do about it. He was on a downward spiral. Everything he'd struggled against for the whole of his adult life—all the world's evil—had finally caught up with him. There was no fighting it. His only option was to see it through to the bitter end. He was smart enough to recognize the self-fulfilling-prophecy aspect of what he was doing, but it was another case of Roger not seeing what he didn't want to.

  Do I have to add that, underneath it all, he was punishing himself for Ted?

  All of which makes it that much more remarkable that the President was able to talk Roger into taking a leave of absence before things got any worse. She waited out the weekend to contact Roger. At the end of his office hours on Monday, she called him herself and asked him if he'd mind joining her for lunch. He agreed. He must have taken this as the moment he'd been waiting for, the end of the line, the walk up to the guillotine. Having the President of the college fire him would have satisfied his pride; that it would be done over lunch would have soothed his anxiety.

  I don't know what Carley said to him up there on the tenth floor. Roger wouldn't tell me. He was waiting for me when I opened the door that afternoon, with a big bouquet of mixed flowers already in a vase on the kitchen table. He took me in his arms, kissed me like he hadn't in weeks, and said, "I had a talk with the President today." Immediately, I tensed. I'd wondered how being fired would affect Roger's pension, if we'd have to rely on my meager paycheck. He felt me stiffen. He said, "It's all right, everything is all right. I've decided to take a leave of absence, effective immediately."

  "You have?"

  "Yes."

  "What happened?" I wasn't a hundred percent sure this wasn't a strange joke, or a set-up for something else, a kind of loyalty test.

  "Suffice it to say, I saw the error of my ways."

  "Really?"

  "Really. Now," he said, "in celebration of my decision—and the newfound freedom attendant upon it—I am taking you to dinner."

  There were thirty essays weighting my bag, not to mention four chapters of The House of the Seven Gables I'd assigned my class that I should at least look over. I left the bag at the door and we finally had our dinner at the Canal House. What a night. I don't know if you've been to the Canal House—it's right on Main Street in Cooper Falls. It costs an arm and a leg and another arm and leg besides. But it's worth it. Roger and I both ordered seven course meals, and they were amazing. And it was all served in this old house. We were in one of the upstairs rooms, at a table next to a window. The room had a fireplace, crackling away. Faintly, you could hear other people in other rooms, voices murmuring, silverware clinking on plates, chairs scraping the floor. Roger—Roger was suddenly his old self again. It was as if he'd been carrying a tremendous weight—a sack full of boulders—for the last two months, and he'd put it down at last. He joked with the waitress, the server who brought us our courses, the wine steward. We talked like we'd used to, trading thoughts and arguing—gently—about books we were reading and teaching. I could feel myself relaxing, so much I realized I hadn't been aware how tense I had become. Roger tipped generously, and after dinner was done—concluded: you don't just finish that ki
nd of meal, you bring it to a conclusion—we walked up Main Street to the falls. Standing looking at all that water foaming white in the moonlight, I could believe that the worst was over, that we'd come near the precipice but saved ourselves from going over it. That night—well, suffice it to say, the night ended well, too.

  There was about a month after that that was almost the honeymoon we'd never taken. We ate out a lot, took day trips, even went away to Martha's Vineyard for a long weekend. I walked around in a daze. My students' grades improved as I read their essays through my new, rose-colored glasses. I gave out more A's that semester than I ever had. Roger was better. He was still sad over Ted's death, but it was a calmer sadness. One night, we talked over maybe trying to have another child. Neither one of us was ready, yet, but at least we could discuss it. That month—it was like a pause, you know? Even then, I felt that way, that this was only an interlude. "As of this moment, I am no longer your father; you are no longer my son": the curse was never as far from me as I would have liked, or the image of those faces hissing in their doorways. I assumed we'd settle into a more normal routine. When I remember that time, those four weeks, I wonder if there was something I could have done. Maybe I should've suggested we go away for a while, spend the next six months or a year driving cross-country—or go to Europe. Roger had lots of friends in London. We could have rented a flat and he could have shown me all the Dickens sites. I could have looked up the places Hawthorne visited when he was in London. Someplace—something that would have taken us—him—away from Huguenot, from that house.