“Mummy, are you all right?”
She turned her face toward him, her eyes full of tears, and she shook her head. “No, no, no, no. I am not all right.”
Then she shrugged. She smiled. She reached out her hand to him and he squeezed hers, molded his body to her side. He was surely the only one who ever knew, and he didn’t really know anything, except that she lived in anguish. He didn’t know exactly what the pain was, but understood both that she couldn’t tell and that she hadn’t minded sharing her secret with him. Sometimes he took that to mean that there was something trustworthy about him. Or that she saw in him a maturity that had been waiting inside to come out and be useful. Yet neither of these interpretations, flattering as they were, produced much feeling in him. It was the sharp lurch of his own spirit in the moment when his mother turned toward him, her cheeks wet, and offered him a shy smile that acknowledged what had happened, but in no way attempted to defend, interpret, shield, or explain the event, that afforded him an expansion of heart and soul.
Polly ventured a question. “Did you ever find out who the woman was?”
“No. I never saw her again.”
“What do you think it was about?”
“No idea. It’s one of those mysteries of life that is never explained.”
“I suppose the explanation is that the feeling between them struck you as being remarkable.”
“True. I was a boy. I’d never seen anything like it before.”
Polly hesitated, but was too curious to hold back. In this instance she felt protected by the dark. “Do you think they were lovers?”
“I’ve considered it. Would they know how to do that, though? In those days?”
“People figure things out. We did.”
“We knew we should and could, though.”
“Things went on at Miss Dictor’s.”
“Huh. True. My school, too.”
He yawned. Time to drop it. Polly’s greatest skill in living in a house full of men was knowing when to stop. There were no medals for it, no recognition, but it kept the peace. “I hope she found peace, don’t you?”
“Is Agnes like that?”
“Like what?” Polly answered automatically, though his meaning was clear.
“Women,” he said.
“Why do you ask?” Polly wanted to say it was none of his business, but she was never harsh with Dick.
“I always thought she might be.”
“Just because she never married—”
“That’s not it. It’s something else about her. She seems more like a man.”
“I know what you mean,” Polly said. “I also know she would say that what you are calling man-like is—” She stopped. She was going to say your own limited perception of what women are like. But battle was over.
Anyway, he nodded off.
He often talked about his betrayal by the department and how unfairly he’d been treated after all he’d done. All those years. He’d kept his head down and prepared his lectures and taught his courses and spent a preposterous number of hours carefully reading and grading papers and exams, seeking in even the laziest and most slapdash of them a trace of conscience or intellect that could be developed. He circled words and salutary rhetorical choices and wrote careful arguments as to why they were good. Arduous work! Time-and mind-consuming work! And most students didn’t even read his comments, or not thoughtfully. They turned to the back of the paper to look for the letter grade and that was that. Dick knew this—he wasn’t stupid—but pressed on anyway. He learned by error and disappointment to treat all students equally and put in his best effort each time out. He thereby became decent, almost by default. His approach was just and it honed his character. He would be unsung and unknown, but he had to believe that spending your life becoming decent made a difference to the world.
“Of course you made a difference,” Polly said. “A huge difference. Your students will never forget you.”
She brought this up again later in the day, but he had no idea what she was talking about. From then on she made little tests, but it always turned out there was a wall between his early morning life and his waking day. For the first time since she’d known him they were developing an intimacy beyond the physical. He was agitated and sometimes incontinent, but he was opening like a bud, and she was there to see it in slow motion. A fresh chance, a new freedom—how true it was that one should never give up.
One morning he told her something so astonishing and so private she could barely believe he’d remembered it much less said it aloud. He remembered knocking on James’s door and when he didn’t get an answer opening it and finding the boy, his eldest, age twelve, lying on his side on the bed, naked, one leg up in the air, looking up at his toes as if they were stars. He was humming. He was in private. Dick recalled that thinking the word private had led his gaze to his son’s privates. He looked away immediately, of course, but he’d taken in the few curled hairs, the maturing flesh. He backed out of the room quietly, undetected, and felt, as he walked gingerly down the hall, a new emotion, an elation, grasping in a visceral way something he’d never felt before—he was a father. He’d made that beautiful curve of flesh and bone, that James, that happy hum in his boy’s throat, that gaze cast upward at his own toes. He was a father!
He didn’t quite know what to do with this new understanding and had gone to look for Polly—I wanted to tell her—but when he spotted her out in the garden troweling soil into a hole, Lydia beside her dribbling clumps of dirt from dimpled fists—he was embarrassed to say what he felt. Who was he to tell her? What could she do but look at him as someone a little stupid and a little immature? She wouldn’t say I told you so, but she had a right to. So he’d backed away and gone into his study to get ahold of himself. He basked, a fat seal on a slab, reveling in the flesh that had made other flesh. He hadn’t counted it as being much—anyone could do it. A tugging urge, a female partner, and it was accomplished. Natural. Basic. But simplicity turned out, over and over, to be the most obscuring disguise. What greater intellectual challenge was there than to recognize the simple?
This moved Polly beyond measure. He was who she’d wished he was.
Dick spoke about the children, and his own father, and old friends, all in fleeting comments, but never Polly. Why not Polly? Shamelessly, she prompted him. “What did you think of me when you met me?” But he didn’t register that, or ignored it. Then there came a morning when he told a story that had Polly digging her nails into her palms. He told of meeting a girl named Polly Hancock, who wasn’t coy about her strong feelings for him. He didn’t believe he warranted such devotion, but he thought it unfair if he felt only affection for her rather than passion. She loved more than convention taught her to. All the aspects of her that might have grown strong and effective if she hadn’t been so early on trained to be normal—they all rocked quietly, like boats tied to buoys in a calm harbor. He had to admit, he liked that. It made sense for a woman to throw herself into love, into her husband and children. Yet he couldn’t love reciprocally out of a sense of fairness.