Yestermorrow

By Xlibris US

In 1973, a tempered wind blew into the Champlain Valley. This is a novel about the pale empresses and dark gargoyles of the human interior. It is a love story told at the end of golden weather, of darkness confronted, comprehended, transcended. Morgan Sizemore, a failed artist, lived long enough for life to bring him two great revelations about itself. By thirty, he had known it would not be what he expected. Later through the turning of a year, he learned that life had not been what he had thought it was. This story concerns that second enlightenment.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jul 26, 2014
• ISBN: 9781499053074

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Copyright © 2014 by Warren R B Dixon.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

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Rev. date: 07/23/2014

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CONTENTS

Author’s Note

Acknowledgement

Part I

The Winter Of 1973

C h a p t e r     O n e

C h a p t e r     T w o

C h a p t e r     T h r e e

C h a p t e r     F o u r

C h a p t e r     F i v e

Part II

The Spring Of 1973

C h a p t e r     S i x

C h a p t e r     S e v e n

C h a p t e r     E i g h t

C h a p t e r     N i n e

C h a p t e r     T e n

C h a p t e r     E l e v e n

C h a p t e r     T w e l v e

Part III

The Summer Of 1973

C h a p t e r     T h i r t e e n

C h a p t e r     F o u r t e e n

C h a p t e r     F i f t e e n

Part IV

The Autumn Of 1973

C h a p t e r     S i x t e e n

C h a p t e r     S e v e n t e e n

C h a p t e r     E i g h t e e n

C h a p t e r     N i n e t e e n

C h a p t e r     T w e n t y

C h a p t e r     T w e n t y - o n e

What is death like, I wonder? I know everything else now…

—Edmond Rostand

A Passez le Mot book in the spirit of Wynken de Worde

Chaplain Valley, New York

to Jeanne

Honour, anger, valour, fire…

Author’s Note

One word of assurance to my virtuoso readers: This book is not about writers, their lives or their problems, nor about academia. It is a book about the pale empresses and dark gargoyles of the human interior. Its protagonist, while the viewpoint is strongly male, could have been a musician, an athlete, a scientist, a businessman. Never mind his suspicious occupation. Mind only that to be human and to reach beyond youth brings us to facts that until then may go unattended. This is a book about the end of golden weather, of darkness confronted, comprehended, transcended. Life brings each of us, should we survive long enough, two great revelations about itself. By thirty we know it will not be what we expected; somewhere beyond forty, should we live so long, we learn that it has not been what we had thought. This book concerns that second enlightenment.

Acknowledgement

Both this novel and its author are indebted to a distinguished editor, David Strange, for his invaluable insights and influence.

PART I

THE WINTER OF 1973

C H A P T E R     O N E

A SLATE SKY, TYPICAL of the little town’s weather, dominated the entire day. Morgan’s office took on the gloom. Its three big windows looked to him like gray doors into eternity. He waited in the dull afternoon light. He had been at it for a couple of hours, magazine browsing, talking to himself, listening to the ghost of a piano on his cassette recorder. Eventually he remembered that Molly would not get back from Long Island until tomorrow, returning after and not upon New Year’s Day.

The expectation of seeing her, while wondering sourly what could be keeping her, had cranked him into a restless and ambivalent mood. Vague inner states had characterized his seven years at the institution. Never quite in focus, never wholly in control, he nevertheless got by, alien and unnoticed.

The large office—he supposed it to be as large as any there, even of administrators—had a faded rug on the floor that Molly had given him. She had also done the curtains; gray ones, matching the sky at the moment. The office had a private toilet and a washbasin, not because Morgan was important. His department had moved into an old hospital building, given up by the medical people after the growing campus had surrounded it with dormitories. His office had once been a hospital room with two beds and a little corner john. People had died in this room, nobody knew how many, and the hospital smell lingered. A rug on the floor, although shabby, and a private toilet in a big office amounted to a coup. He was but an obscure member of an obscure faculty in an obscure upstate college.

Coup or not, he would have preferred the little private cell he had occupied for several years on the eighth floor of the administration tower. He had liked the lordly view, a contemplative panorama of treetops, shining rain-wet streets, roofs, esplanades, the plume of a distant fountain. The nights had lain as a net of lights below him. He could work there. He could not work here in the lingering smell of a hospital, in a room full of unremembered deaths, where the windows looked out upon the grim exteriors of dormitories across parking lots. The abandoned hospital, old, dismal, and upon this day deserted except for Morgan, further deadened the sullen light from the haze beyond its ledges. He could not work here, though the walls were lined with his own library and he was surrounded by familiar things.

He had awakened that morning on the beach, in the big frame house on the lake. He had awaken in the back bedroom beneath a bayonet, looking like a cross upon the wall. A young woman named Sunday Smith lay beside him. She had crawled to the foot of the bed and leaned down to turn off the buzzing. They sometimes left the clock on the floor like that to make sure the alarm was trouble to stop, to make sure of waking. He observed her bottom like a cleft moon beyond his feet. She got up from the bed, a constellation of moles across her back, little dark stars. She was good to look at, taut-skinned, slim. She was only twenty-three, a high school gym teacher, a slow, shuffling, kind, and lovely girl (Morgan’s term for her). She was sniffling with a cold. He watched her. Something in him aged and wooden kept his heart from singing. She dressed quickly in the chilly room. Soon she was gone, the sound of her Mustang starting up in the driveway, then silence.

When he remembered in the afternoon that Molly would not come home from Long Island until the next day, he left the sad office, walked down empty corridors and echoing stairwells, out an ambulance entrance to his dilapidated Pontiac, stone cold by a gray wall. He decided to spend the night at Molly’s apartment a block away, four little rooms up under the eaves, the roof pulled down over them like a snug hat. There he wandered about in his underwear, substituting corn flakes and absent-minded refrigerator snacks for a decent supper.

His mood defied his work. Instead he began to read a paperback mystery, going fast at it, disdainful, half attentive, pausing for ten-minute daydreams. He looked out the small kitchen window, surprised to find the night already there. A Southerner from the shallow South of Kentucky, he never felt at ease with these bitterly shortened afternoons on the edge of Canada. He took the book to bed. He finished it at two in the morning with an after-television feeling of wasted time. He turned out the light and sat in the dark in Molly’s bed, knees up against his chin, thinking of God whose improbability and silence left him, as always, with a sense of waiting for nothing to come back again forever.

The next day’s sunlight came like a creation, the whole apartment ablaze with noon. He went to the window from where he could see the administration building poking straight up into an exquisite sky, cloudless, pale blue. Such a day always made him think of Colorado where, for blue weeks at a time, the sky would hover above Boulder with nothing more than feather clouds and jet trails imperfecting space. Molly’s apartment was on a third floor of a house just off campus. Last year, when he was working late in the little cell on the eighth level of the tower, Molly would see his light, the only one among the banks of darkened windows, shining after midnight. She had called it his glow because he worked by ordinary lamp instead of stark fluorescent lights, his window a soft yellow square in the dark.

Molly’s apartment had an attic-like atmosphere. The ceilings sloped down to meet the walls, particularly in the two little bedrooms where her children usually slept across the hall from each other. Two years separated the children’s ages. The daughter, Cybele, the older, had not yet reached ten. A dreamy quiet child who read a lot, Cybele had the linear Botticelli face, lank silky straight hair, and eyes as brown as her mother’s. Jay-Jay, the boy, a noisy sparkler, lived far more in the immediate world around him. He kept a chaotic room and had to be badgered into the least housekeeping. Cybele’s room stayed neat always, embellished with miniature animals, little statuettes she collected methodically. Jay-Jay and Cybele were such thin tall children that Morgan sometimes called them Molly’s Watusis.

He wandered about the empty apartment, dressing himself one item at a time, for most of the noon hour. The pale blue airiness would be brief, the winter dark come down soon upon anyone starting the day so late. He readied himself for the short afternoon by drinking a mug of instant coffee heavily ladled with a powdered creamer to make it smooth. Molly hated the creamer and the instant coffee, kept only for Morgan’s sake.

Back at the old hospital, that ridiculous eyesore warehouse of a place, he found his office now strangely bright with sun. He had put off, as long as he could, paying various bills, often losing the original notices and never precisely sure of the amount in his checking account. From time to time he would be forced into a session of pulling together his obligations. Such a session had become necessary now.

At the sunlit desk he made out checks for the telephone, the utilities, and the loan from Beneficial Finance. The first two checks were late enough to imperil his telephone service. The lights at the house on the beach might suddenly go out. But the loan company check was on time; he would need their help before leaving soon for Europe. He had guessed six weeks ago that he would stoop to this, but he had put off the dreaded trip to the loan office. He normally put off every unpleasant thing he could: checks to an ex-wife in Colorado, filing income taxes, obtaining loans, getting reservations for his flight to Germany, or finishing the grading of final examinations. Those grades were due at the Registrar’s in just three days and he had not touched them.

He had always explained his faults as the dark side of his virtue, his preoccupation with the life of an artist. From where he sat at his desk, he could have turned to see the six wonderful flops, occupying no more than eight inches of shelf space. They supposedly justified his inattention to ordinary life over the past twenty-five years. He was a failed writer, his work unknown and unread. Each of these productions had gone out into the world as into a vacuum. The total impact of each had been a few press notices and a contemptible trickle of royalties, then nothing, silence, nothing at all, his work settling into that purgatory where dead books go. That would have been acceptable had he been a true academic. Six unread publications might take a scholar far. But these were novels, and unread novels are like unloved women.

Praiseless, he had kept the faith. He had supported himself at a dozen jobs, often rising at four in the morning and laboring until dawn. He had absorbed his weekends, had worked furiously between jobs until the savings ran out. Morgan had once lived for a year dependent upon a wife’s largess. Lack of money had driven him into graduate school where he had hated only the dissertation, which had interfered with his work. Now, hanging by his fingernails in academe, lucking his way into tenure at a bush-league college, he had gone on and on with his peculiar way of life. He had subordinated everything else to the urge and itch that had ruined him for more sensible occupations. The teaching, which was just a job with good hours, had excited him a while, then settled into being only an absent-minded infringement. It beat driving a truck or selling shoes or pumping gas or loading freight cars, all of which he had done. Somehow he had survived in this alien place, partly because of the unread books he had written, partly in spite of them. Some saw him as the intruder that he knew himself to be.

Well, you can fool all some and some all, thank God, Morgan said, for he talked to himself a good deal. Certainly he was a down-and-outer there on the campus, an out-of-placer wandering into a classroom, tired and wrinkled after a night’s work, to talk to students, most of them young women, about Washington Irving or Nathaniel Hawthorne or Herman Melville or, far worse, to preside over classes in English composition. He found it a curious and unreal situation, an odd and almost embarrassing way to earn a living.

Molly came back that afternoon. Her return was spoiled for Morgan because King, an Air Force sergeant and lately a rival, stayed with her until evening. Morgan did not see her until after dark. His office became again a gray forbidding place as the sun went out. The silence in the old building on the campus yielded now and then to the FB-111s thundering up from the SAC base a few miles away.

Of late he had been hearing a new sound in his old Pontiac. It spelled trouble—a malevolent entropy dragging at his aging car. He thought the same of himself, of a new and ominous tick from deep inside. His work had palled. He was either too right or too wrong to doubt himself. Something more insidious than doubt gnawed at Morgan. He had with him a chaos of notes two feet high. He had begun putting off the essential labors. He had wasted the sunlight talking to himself, listening to the small tin piano sounds that came out of the cassette recorder, mimicking Beethoven as from the bottom of an empty barrel where some diminutive pianist labored over a sonata.

Morgan thumbed through an old copy of Newsweek, nibbled at some Metrecal cookies, made a cup of coffee on a plug-in percolator, stared out the windows ten minutes at a time, put off the boring job of grading the examinations, pawed for an hour at the pile of notes and unconnected scenes that, for the lack of a title, he had begun to call the libraccio, a plagiarized name with just the right feel for an incubus. Then he cleaned out his desk, drawer after drawer, of surprises, forgotten details, rediscoveries. It was like unearthing a tell. He kept at the long tedious job stubbornly, finishing it at six o’clock just as the telephone rang. It was Molly.

She fed him a dinner of meat loaf and mashed potatoes and string beans, on a dish too hot to touch, served to him on a metal folding stand set up in front of the television in her parlor. The room had Molly’s bed in it because she and the two children were crowded in the attic apartment. As Morgan sat watching NBC News, Molly’s recently divorced ex-husband dropped in, catching him thus domestically ensconced. Morgan felt uneasy and embarrassed, though the tall good-looking young man with a drooping mustache bore him no ill will, made friendly remarks, and turned to the children. Those several hours went by less pleasantly than he had expected. Mentally elsewhere, Molly kept him at a distance. She lent him her VW bus for the night. He had left his dying Pontiac parked at the ambulance entrance of the ex-hospital on campus. The connecting rod from the accelerator had broken when he tried to start it. He drove the VW bus home to the beach to spend the night alone in his old frame house, creaking and spooky in the night winds.

As a first sign that the peace between semesters must soon end, he found on his next trip there that the staff was drifting back to the old office building. He had gone in early this time, determined to work, but his mind circled the libraccio warily, glad for the diversion of others nearby. He could hear their doors and their voices down the hall. Upon going to the secretary’s office to check his mail, the casual encounters began. He had conversations with them as forgettable as the rustling of leaves. A young colleague thrust pages of a doctoral dissertation upon Morgan who obligingly wasted an hour reading minutiae about Thomas Bailey Aldrich. He lost another hour talking about it. Morgan had his lunch at his desk—coffee and Metrecal cookies again—while committing his first act toward Friday’s deadline for last semester’s grades. He recorded the names of his students in the grade book, a procedure he had been putting off since the previous September. Two events took up the afternoon. He got the Pontiac fixed and The White Nile came in the mail, a fine edition that he examined with an air of muted excitement peculiar to bibliophiles.

When the early dark came back, he took the book to Molly’s for her to see. She responded by showing him a sampler she had been working on for months, virtually completed now. Don’t shoot the piano player. He’s doing his best, the sampler said in red and green needlework. He would hang it on the wall above his out-of-tune upright as soon as he got back from Europe. The sampler properly gauged his musical talent, that of a tin-eared dilettante. He was touched by the gift because she had taken such trouble and care. He liked its humor. After the children were asleep, he kissed her. Only then was she returned to him from Long Island.

Molly was a tall stately young woman with fine legs and arms. She had straight silken hair that had reappeared in her daughter, Cybele. Again the Botticelli face, as with Cybele, the clean line of the jaw; close-set, dark, expressive eyes peeping over large oval glasses; a thin mouth that could look puritanical but never was. Suddenly he stripped her naked. Her stomach was puckered with stretch marks from bearing the two children. The rest of her was perfect. Molly had reached twenty-nine, that last milestone of fleeing youth.

The spontaneity served them well. The mystical lust returned. They went to bed hurriedly and reeled off drunkenly into an eroticism that left a bone-deep satisfaction. They were animals about it, transcending that animality somehow, flesh made emotions. It was total. In her stricken eyes he could see it was the same with her. He left her there, stunned and moist.

He drove back along the beach in his throbbing Pontiac. In Morgan’s fancy, Orion stumbled headlong into the water, his foot caught on a hill. Morgan stopped the car a minute to stare at the icy stars. Sirius looked real. It had the appearance of a near object, not just one of those twinkling points that usually seemed more an idea than a thing. Morgan could have rowed across the night water to that star, the way it looked.

Alone in the old frame house, he lay in the dark listening to the wind prowling ominously. He heard a thumping and guessed it to be the aluminum porch furniture. The wind kept trying the windows. He felt a slight atavistic twinge of anxiety. He was thinking of getting the bayonet from the wall above his bed, when sleep undid the fears.

He was wasting the early suns of the January thaw. He spent his one o’clock postmeridian morning at the Dairy Queen, ablaze with glass walls. He sat in a booth in the prefabricated diner at the edge of town, reading by sunlight, his hamburger breakfast devoured inattentively as he poured over The White Nile. He dawdled over coffee, glancing up now and then at the traffic on Route 3. Those treks through Africa could not have been such absorbing dramas as time and distance and a well-written book made them. They must have been, most of the time, mindlessly dull ordeals, endured as much in search of the bubble reputation as for the source of the Nile. There next to the glass, the gentle heat on his face, casually aware of the incidental coming and going of a few customers and the cheerful talk, voices without words, of the girls in their Dairy Queen outfits, life formed a stream of pleasant, trivial, kind sensations that could go on forever. His reveries were broken suddenly by the vibrations of the glass walls as an FB-111 thundered up across the town. He could see it over the shopping center for several seconds, dividing the sky with its ominous physics. He closed the colorful book, a waterfall on its jacket, and left a smile with his favorite Dairy Queen girl. He headed for his campus office to fritter away the afternoon picking ineffectively at an insipid pile of little blue-covered booklets in which his students had committed their indiscretions and gaucheries. The dark closed too soon about the building, ending his four hours of daylight.

Watching Ironside on Molly’s television, he had to turn it off and to leave because her Air Force sergeant would be there soon. Morgan had never met the man. Only lately had she allowed King to come to the apartment. For a time after her separation from her husband she would permit no one to come upstairs. Because of the children. Morgan had been the first exception. Only lately had she given King access to her home. She had known the man for some time. Even before Morgan met Molly, she had been meeting King for motel nights in Montreal. She had given that up, at first, for her incandescent intimacy with Morgan.

He had betrayed it all. The betrayal had been a deliberate philosophical act against the way in which marriage had closed down three times over him like a premature middle age. Each ended in a wrenching divorce in which he must tear out a part of himself forever. The kid Sunday Smith had come along last August, soliciting his attention with every look and touch. It had been hard for Molly a while. She had made a peace of sorts with it, turning back to King again. I’m better at one-to-one, she had told him. Sometimes he saw tears in her eyes and she could not speak. Recently he had found King’s wristwatch on the lamp table next to the bed. The man’s surname was King. Morgan thought it both appropriate and odd. King would fix broken items around the apartment—a leaky faucet, a door handle, a lamp. Morgan would note some such improvement after one of King’s visits, made only when the children were off in a nearby town with their father, as now.

The old tank-like Pontiac growled once more along the lake. The surf formed pale ribbons in the dark. The stars were on his mind. He was aware of them out there in that senseless infinity as he drove once more beside the water. Not a single gauge was working on the dashboard of the old car. The gasoline tank always showed empty, the miles per hour were zero. Nor could he check the oil because the oil stick had rusted away a couple of years ago. Only the windshield wiper on the driver’s side functioned. The backseat was full of yellowing copies of the New York Times, notebooks, unopened junk mail, textbooks, and ditto copies of college memoranda. Somehow water had once gotten onto the back floor of the automobile, probably from snow. The Metropolitan Opera Guide had cemented itself to the flooring materials. The lights functioned properly only on bright, so he could not dim them without their going out. The windows, controlled by electric switches, did not go up and down anymore. Nor could the air conditioner perform, seldom needed anyway in the North Country. The radio was dead and its antenna rusted away. The safety inspection was due next month. Only a master mechanic or a crook could ever get it through again. He was thinking of taking it to the town dump, removing the plates, and sending it over a precipice of garbage before he left for Europe.

At the house he built a fire in the hearth, using the birch wood stacked outside the kitchen door. He did it to make the room cheerful. Sunday Smith was on her way. He listened to the phonograph while copying the sounds on cassettes. He planned to take music, as though it were a necessity, to Europe. After a lone guitar, heard while dreaming by the fire, Sunday Smith came in at the kitchen door.

They went upstairs together at once, ignoring the cheerful birch fire. For an hour the dark of the back bedroom was lovelier than he could explain. After exhaustion, whispering. He got up reluctantly by clock-light, dressed, then left her to sleep alone while he went downstairs to the blue-book exams. He saved the dying fire and pulled the chair up to it. The blue-book problem would go on all night, he knew. He would do it now because the deadline was upon him. He completed the tedium just before dawn, the fire having long since died of neglect. He went upstairs and crept in beside Sunday Smith. She came sleepily up against him, her warm nakedness making a place for him. He slept so soundly he never even woke when she left a short time later.

I am not so much divorced from reality as legally separated from it, he had told Molly. Morgan lived inside himself a shade too much. He forgot things, lost things, kept things too long. His disorganization showed up in the backseat of his old car. Molly had laughed and asked, once as he was locking the car door, Trying to keep people from throwing trash in it?

Where had he lost the scarf that Sunday Smith gave him for Christmas? He pondered the matter and suspected he had left it either at the Dairy Queen or at the office of the loan company. He returned to the Dairy Queen to search under the booth. He may have left it there after spending another hour pouring over The White Nile. That morning, on the way in from the beach, he had abandoned his gloves at Jackson’s Texaco and had to double back two miles to get them. They were expensive zero mittens that were making his hands sweat during the January thaw. He had to go downtown to get a loan because he could not manage back income taxes and an airplane ticket to Europe also. At the loan company he discovered he had forgotten some necessary papers. Muttering, he forced himself back to the campus for them. Morgan watched inner cinemas. The outside world sometimes intruded when an exit door opened and the daylight forced the darkness of that movie-palace head of his.

Returning to the loan office he found that a student from his classes worked there. He felt embarrassed filling out the request form in front of a student. Why, hello, doctor, the young man said.

–And what are you doing here, doctor, among the bad credit risks?

–Just being one of them, son.

He took Molly out to the Four Brothers Inn, not in celebration of the detested loan but because Molly had asked for an evening out. The children were off with their father. King was back on the air base. Molly liked the Four Brothers Inn. The gracious old barn of a place had been built back in the eighteen hundreds. Morgan was known there and always treated well. After the chateaubriand for two, he took her home with him to the beach. Then for an hour or so she played his piano, mostly the simpler sort of Bach, the little preludes, a minuet or two. She was a good sight-reader. Molly had a natural bent, ruined by neglect, for the keyboard. When first she had met Morgan, seeing that he was pleased with her music, she would learn pieces and surprise him with them. Then Sunday Smith came along and Molly gave up the surprises.

He and Molly were comfortable together. Molly was from the working class. It showed in her apartment, in her attitudes, her tastes. She was earthy, generous, practical, largely uneducated in spite of her degree in education and her job teaching the first grade. She was good with children; so good it was a rare talent. Her Long Island parents, who had raised themselves by hard work to moderate conditions, hated the working class. It came out as hostility to unions and a hot contempt for anyone on welfare. Morgan and the parents had liked each other. They thought of him as nothing but a college professor, impractical, too bookish for solid common sense, one of those over-educated people who had voted for McGovern against Nixon, doubtless out of inexperience with the real world. Still they were polite and good-natured with him. They had endowed Molly with their practicality but with little else. She had an original spirit, thought her own thoughts, and went her own way.

He found the ghost that had been bumping and prowling in the night. It turned out to be an attic door blowing to and fro because the wind had opened the front attic window. The diamond-shaped window, trimmed in colored glass, swung inward and had no lock. He had to fix it with a nail. When he looked out of it, he could see miles down the moonlit lake. A warm kitten-soft wind came out of the south. Because of the warm night, they had left the engine heater in Molly’s VW bus unconnected. That turned out to be a misplaced trust in the January thaw. By morning a zero cold had crawled down out of Canada.

In spite of the unheated room in the bitter dawn they woke secure under an electric blanket. They took their sweet time with each other on the flowered sheets. Afterward, as she was leaving, he could see that the cold air of the room had put goose pimples on her arms. He followed her mentally down the stairs. He listened to the VW engine trying to catch in the deep cold. It almost failed, just grinding weakly. Then it got going, growled a while as Molly gunned it up and down. He heard the bus back down the driveway, turn and head for town. He tried to follow Molly in his mind down the road, but he lost the image within a mile. Perhaps that was why he lived so much in his head. The cramped radius of reality had the reach of a prison cell. In contrast, imagination went everywhere.

Now that he was free of the Registrar’s deadline, he could not legitimately put off the libraccio any longer. Nevertheless, he lingered over The White Nile for another hour of late coffee at the Dairy Queen on an oblique approach to the pile of notes in his desk. At grips with the adversary by noon—for somehow that matrix of notes, that loom of creation number seven, had become a mocking adversary—he had traveled until mid-afternoon at a Flaubertian pace, presiding over the first ten sentences like an addled god. The department’s secretary was back now from two weeks off without pay, a slow, fat, gray-eyed young woman hired from temporary service funds. He could hear her typewriter going from the little room that had once been a hospital kitchen. She had come in on a Saturday at the request of the chairman, a dumpy round-faced Southerner with a flat Tennessee voice and an unlikely specialization in Chaucer. The chairman was back at his post across the hall. He interrupted Morgan several times with inanities and confidences. He was always politicking, that dumpy cigar-smoker whose life’s effort centered now upon his administrative ambitions. Those ambitions had spread over the English Department like an acrid smog, causing Morgan to draw back to the very minimal possible contact with its affairs.

Today Morgan welcomed the interruptions. The intended afternoon of work seemed gray and unbearable. Why? He had always loved his work, especially at that beginning made a quarter of a century ago in the back rooms of tenement houses. He had just finished his heady undergraduate years at Columbia. His had been the stuff of heroic intentions. He had been like Browning’s Waring, with no work done, but great work undone. Now he was huddled over his typewriter with the sure knowledge that he was growing old and working his life away to no avail, his unread novels on the shelf behind him. Yet they had been the level best that he could do, taken out of the very center. He had kept the faith, kept the long purpose, had given his life to one obsession, never doubting until, here on the dark side of forty, the world’s indifference sat upon him like a steel-clawed bird.

Is that what he had wanted—praise? Was that all? Had his spirit been so small as to thrive on such canary feed as the transient opinions of strangers he would never meet, satisfied with the phony immortality of the artist, the preening of a prize or at least some mark of fame, if only notoriety? Yet the world had denied him even infamy, had taken those half a dozen wrenching total efforts from him as the sea might take six pebbles tossed one at a time into its immensity. He had gone unpaid and unknown.

He would have sworn that each of his projects had been worth its hire. Others knew better. The merchants tolerated him as a long shot, but with the thin tolerance of business for poor risks. Among the merchants the worth of a man or a woman had a literal meaning. Only Morgan believed in Morgan. What he did mattered because what he did had been, in each case, rare and dearly bought by a thousand vigils, by discipline and sacrifice for an imagination that had been a maker of worlds.

If the business mind’s judgment of him had been hard, he could at least understand it. Some other people might have cared. A good-looking woman anthropologist, just twenty-six, an activist in the feminist movement on campus, had read his books.

She told him, "All genius is culturally determined, perhaps especially genius is so determined, an accident of time and place and circumstance, a group production, nothing to fuss about where the particular person is concerned who happens to manifest it."

Annoyed, he had shrugged. Genius is a dead man’s word.

Damned women’s lib broad! All he had needed of her had been, if not comprehension or a sense of mutual respect, a lyric apple or two. Even worse, his friend Mark Pagan, the Political Science Department’s resident belletrist whose biography of Albert Camus had won such respect and praise, and even sold well, who was editor of a minor journal wherein had appeared Pagan’s own highly readable essays on the government of France, who was gifted and cosmopolitan (but for all that was not at Harvard), had told Morgan that fame or even lesser recognition was but a chance. Wings might beat in a void; talent might perform and die, if not wholly unknown then barely noticed. Would the world have heard of Crick and Watson if Pauling had beaten them to the double helix? Why is Einstein a household word while de Sitter sounds vaguely like Uncle Remus’s dog? Was not the difference more a matter of sequence, circumstance, and baseball inches than of God-struck fire?

Many an angel has burned in hell.

So said Mark, leaning across his Boston scrod at the Four Brothers Inn and pouring himself a glass of B&G Chablis, smiling slightly in deference to the world he tolerated with amusement. With a white beard at fifty and a full shock of silvering hair, Mark arrested the feminine eye still. As tall and imperially thin as Richard Cory, he was American born, but one generation out of France. He had gone back often for things that mattered. Sorbonne educated, as European as American in his culture, he discouraged his failed-writer friend with a variety of wit and skepticism during their Thursday nights of table talk at the Four Brothers. Morgan, wrestling with his adversary all the gray afternoon in his gloomy office, reflected on the acknowledgment by James Jones, at the back of From Here to Eternity, of the quietly competent help and encouragement that had made it all possible.

"Where are those helpful sons of bitches?" he muttered. The work was dry and empty in the ten-sentence day.

The evening brought a far better feeling. He left his unreliable Pontiac in Molly’s garage and borrowed her VW bus. He picked up Sunday Smith at her small modern apartment, shared with two other young women, also teachers. In black stockings and a miniskirt, she radiated health, fun, zest, all that youth commands. Morgan felt proud of her good looks, the tune of things that ran along with Sunday Smith. Her jock conversations about volleyball scores and cheerleader tryouts he took amiably, even with interest.

They went out into a deep cold, below zero. The hairs in his nose froze with his breath. He had dressed lighter than normal because they were going to a dinner party. He wore