My Dearest Friend (9 page)

“Come around back!” he heard Daphne call. He noticed then that a narrow jagged rough path had been cut through the high grass; more of the grass had been pushed over than actually cut. Following it around the side of the house, he saw Daphne at the edge of the forest, on her knees, reaching into the raspberry bushes. A large blue-and-white-striped bowl was on the ground beside her, almost full of berries. Daphne was wearing blue shorts, an old, too-large (perhaps originally a man’s?) T-shirt, no shoes. When she turned and stood up, strips of grass and flecks of dirt clung to her damp white legs and feet.

“I’m so glad you came!” she said. “I’ve got more berries here than I can ever use. I’ll freeze some, of course, for the winter. I love making a raspberry pie in the middle of winter. For a few moments I can taste summer again. But even with freezing them I’ve got more than I can use. Come in the house and let me give you a bowl to take home.” She led the way to her back door. “How are you?” she asked over her shoulder.

“Oh, fine,” Jack said politely. “How are you?”

Daphne laughed. “Well, as my grandmother used to say, ‘Fair to middlin’.’ I think the rain got me down today. It seemed to go on
forever.
”

“Why, look at your place!” Jack said. He gazed around the kitchen, then stepped through into the living room. A really amazing transformation had taken place. This was a
home
now, this was a
refuge.
Here was a case of the whole being more than the sum of its parts, because it was not just that there were now rugs here, and curtains, and furniture, and pictures and books and magazines and vases and andirons and fireplace tools. It was the way they were all there together, in a wonderful bright harmony that was at once soothing and invigorating.

“My God,” Jack said, “how did you do all this? You didn’t even have your furniture in here at the beginning of the week.”

“Oh, well,” Daphne said, “it was just about all I did all week.” She looked carefully at Jack. “And I didn’t have anyone else to take care of or cook for or anything—and I didn’t have Cynthia’s opinions to bother me. I just put things where I wanted them.”

“That must be a good feeling,” he said. It was almost as if she knew about the
Prince stand-up. He let his shoulders sag a little, his mouth tense.

“Would you like a drink?” Daphne asked. “You look like you could use a drink.”

“Yes, I would. I would very much like a drink,” Jack said, following her back into the kitchen. (What a wonderful place, with plump blue-and-white-checked cushions on the captain’s chairs and Dutch-looking canisters lined up all in order on the clean counters, and a vase of wildflowers in the middle of the table.) “In fact, I’ll be honest, I came down here just hoping you would offer me a drink. Carey Ann’s off somewhere, shopping with Alexandra, I imagine, and there’s not a drop of anything alcoholic in the house. And I’ve just had a run-in with the head of my department.”

“Oh,” Daphne said. “What did Hudson do?”

Jack told her about his episode with Hudson while Daphne fixed his drink (she even cut and squeezed a wedge of fresh lime into it—why didn’t they ever have fresh limes at home?) and set it before him, and then, easily, with her effortless sort of gliding movements, she put some cheese and whole-wheat crackers on a wooden tray and set those on the table too. He loved this, loved having someone take care of him a little bit (and at the same time he felt a little guilty for being so glad to be with a woman other than Carey Ann).

When he had finished talking about his Prince stand-up, Daphne sat there a moment thinking. Jack waited, knowing she would say something supportive.

“Well,” Daphne said at last, a slight wrinkle between her brows, “you know, Hudson is a reasonable man. I think that if you had insisted, he would have let you keep the thing, and he would not have harbored a grudge. Hudson’s good about that. He may be a bit of a stick, but he doesn’t hold grudges. Well, I guess you can’t if you’re part of a department. A successful department.” She was gazing in the general direction of the refrigerator when she said all that, but now she turned toward Jack and looked at him as she spoke, smiling, and relaxing her limbs, crossing her arms on the table, leaning forward in a conspiratorial pose. “You know, Jack, now that I think about it, I do think Hudson’s instincts were correct. I’ll tell you why. I think something like that is more a display of ego than of … whatever, anything else. I remember so well, when I was a junior in college. We had a biology professor who looked
just
like Paul Newman. God, he was handsome. He was really something to look at. The same blue eyes. Perhaps he was a little taller than Paul Newman, I don’t know, I’ve heard that Newman’s short, but you can’t tell from the movies. Anyway, all the girls had terrible crushes on him, and we
talked about him all the time. We wondered if he knew he looked like Paul Newman. Then a horrible thing happened. Oh, it makes me squirm to think about it. We had to go into his office to pick up our midterm tests and discuss our biology projects with him. Everyone had to do a special project. So I walked into his room, just swooning and shaking with excitement to think I’d be alone with him for even five minutes, and … oh, God, it just makes me cringe to think about it: he had a small office, and his desk was right in the middle of the office, facing the door, and right behind his desk, taped to the wall, facing us, was a
huge
poster of Paul Newman. It must have been ten feet by five feet, and Paul Newman was staring right out at you, so that when Mr. Ryder looked up from his desk, both he and Paul Newman were staring at you. Oh, God, I was so embarrassed for him! I just wanted to scream, I wanted to say, ‘Oh, please take that thing down, we know you’re handsome, we’ve got eyes, we can see you look like Paul Newman, don’t be so vain or insecure or whatever it is, you really do not have to pound it into our heads like that.’ Of course, I didn’t say those things, but afterward, when I talked to everyone else in the class, male and female,
everyone
was just laughing at him. Everyone just thought he was the biggest joke. No one respected him anymore. He must have wondered. He must have sensed the change in the attitude in the classroom. God. The poor man. You know, it’s often the incredibly handsome men who are the most insecure. It’s a riddle, isn’t it?”

Daphne sat sipping her drink for a few moments. Jack sat digesting all she had said. He wasn’t quite sure what to make of it, but he didn’t feel soothed. He didn’t feel supported. He almost wondered if he’d been insulted.

“Not that you look like Prince!” Daphne laughed. “And not that you wanted it in there for reasons of vanity. I think you wanted it there to give your students an idea of what you are like, to let them know that you’re young, and thus on their side, and you can have a real meeting of the minds, and all of that. But, Jack, you know, the students who come to this college are really
bright.
Most of them. They appreciate subtlety. They can even use a bit of mystery. You don’t have to advertise anything about you—and I guess that’s what that Prince thing would seem like to me, a sort of advertisement—and believe me, you don’t need that. Well, I’ve only just met you, but you’ve got the right feeling about you. You look preppy and Ivy League-y and all that, but you don’t look stuffy, you don’t
feel
cold, and that’s what they’ll respond to about you. Your warmth.”

Jack was chagrined to feel a flush crawl up his neck and across his cheeks. No
one had ever spoken about his “warmth” before, and he was flattered. And he
was
warm, too, sitting here in this kitchen on a humid hot day, the alcohol, in spite of the ice, heating him a little. He thought about what Daphne had just said, and he thought she was right. She was so perceptive. And, put in her words, he could understand more clearly Hudson’s reaction to the Prince stand-up, and now all his anger at Hudson dissolved. He felt young but not hopeless; new, but not stupid.

“It really helps to talk to you,” he said. (Was he drunk? Should he be talking this way to this woman? Would it make Carey Ann jealous? Was he doing something
wrong
? But it was so nice to have someone on his side.) “I can see it all in a different perspective now.” He rose. “Thank you very much. You have been so kind. This was just what I needed—a drink and a good talk. Someday you’ll have to come … oh, borrow a cup of sugar or something. And I really want you to meet Carey Ann and Alexandra.”

“Actually,” Daphne said, rising also, “I met them. I called and asked them to come over this morning. I’ve been trying to think how to tell you this, Jack, and I hope it won’t cause any bad feelings.”

Oh God!, Jack thought. What happened?

Daphne was still talking, and moving back into the living room. “Your little daughter climbed up on the piano and crawled across it and knocked everything over, and I’m afraid that I told Carey Ann that she shouldn’t let her child do things like that. I’m very afraid I upset her, your wife, I mean, and I’m so sorry, because I liked your wife, and your daughter, and I didn’t mean to make her angry.”

Visions of the temper tantrums Carey Ann was capable of throwing flashed before Jack’s eyes and he was mortified. After a few seconds he found his voice. “Carey Ann got angry?”

“Well, justifiably so,” Daphne said. “Jack, all mothers are like tigers when it comes to their children—they can’t bear criticism. I don’t blame her a bit.”

Shit, Jack thought, what a day. “What did she do?”

Daphne smiled. “She just … said she could understand why my daughter doesn’t want to live with me.”

Jack flushed again, and went mute with misery.

Daphne reached her hand out and gently touched his arm. “Oh, please, don’t worry,” she said. “I shouldn’t have even told you, but on the other hand, I didn’t want it to become some awful secret. It was really nothing at all. I shall feel very sorry if I’ve
upset your wife, and I really do like Carey Ann and Alexandra, really I do, Jack. I was rude to say anything to her. I was wrong. I wish I had remembered how difficult it was for me, as a young faculty wife, with a baby.”

“I think Carey Ann’s having a hard time,” Jack said, feeling he owed Daphne an explanation for his wife’s behavior—he didn’t want her to think Carey Ann was a nut or had no manners; at the same time, he felt bad, as if he were betraying Carey Ann. “Away from her parents and all her friends.”

“Oh, I’m sure of it,” Daphne said. “After all, you’ve got the people at the college to talk to, who know you and what you’re about. But she’s new here, and it takes quite a while to make good friends, real friends. And it’s such hard work taking care of a little child. Jack, would you do me a favor, please?” Daphne headed for the front door, and Jack followed. She took two yellow rain slickers from the coatrack. “I meant to call her, but perhaps it’s better coming from you. Give these back to her and tell her I’m very sorry about this morning. Tell her I’d really like for her and Alexandra to come visit again … we’ll start all over fresh. Tell her I was probably just tired after working so hard all week to get my house in order.”

Jack slogged back home over the muddy ruts, the rain slickers squeaking over one shoulder, a bowl of ruby-red beaded raspberries in his hands, the berries glistening from the recent rain. As soon as he was hidden from Daphne’s sight, in the overarching avenue of trees, he popped a few berries into his mouth: they were sweet and tart at once. Now he was really tired. Thoughts and images were colliding in his head. He ate a few more berries, thinking as he did so how his daughter would like them: they were pretty and little and could be eaten with fingers, and they were bright: they looked bright, and they even
tasted
bright. Each berry was a cheerful surprise—like the male cardinal that now flashed across the road right before his eyes.

It was a perfect evening for the picnic, Daphne thought, for the college had been in session for two weeks now and the satisfying routine of a term under way was established. The weather, which had been mostly cool and rainy and cloudy, fall-like, keeping them in the mood to beaver away indoors, had changed just today. The sun had come out and the humidity had disappeared and the evening was blue and gold and warm.

Marcia Johannsen, who was in charge of the faculty-club affairs, had set the bar up on the wide side porch of the club. She’d put tables and chairs there too, so that the older and more ramrod faculty could keep their dignity and reserve. This unfortunately had the effect of dividing the faculty and the members of the faculty club into the old guard and the new peons. Those who had chairs and sat above, looking down, and those who had to squat, humbly, on blankets on the grass, being looked down upon. Well, there really wasn’t any way around it, Daphne and Marcia agreed, standing off to the side, talking in low voices. The old guard was, after all,
old,
many of them, dignified and revered scholars and professors, with arthritis or some ailment that made it difficult to lower themselves all the way to the ground. Hudson, who was not so old, sat among them, partly because of his status, partly because his wife, Claire, with her bad back, chose to sit there.

Then, too, the new faculty were the ones with the little children, who did somersaults down the hill and chased each other around the faculty club. The youngest children lay on blankets, sucking bottles or their thumbs, or happily mashing up potato chips. Here these younger professors were parents first, of necessity, and they had worn slacks and skirts and dresses that could easily be washed, unlike the older faculty, who shone in their white linen trousers and blue blazers and silk flowered sundresses.

Daphne was wearing a blue cotton dress, one of her favorite warm-weather dresses. She had on low heels, respectable enough for the porch, sensible enough for the grass. She was—and always would be—an “in-between” person; because she was only a secretary, she’d never be able to sit on the porch even when she was old. Well, maybe they’d let her sit there when she was
really
old and infirm and had become an “institution.” There were enough people here (all on the porch) who remembered her as
the wife of a professor and therefore deserving of a certain amount of respect, although that group was gradually shrinking and that memory fading. But she was popular, in general, with everyone; she was a good secretary, she didn’t play games, she didn’t gossip, she didn’t try to sleep with any of her bosses, and she was nice. The only people who snubbed Daphne were two or three very old faculty wives who had been here from the time when the college was for men only and who needed to snub
somebody
to keep their feeling of superiority in a world where they’d lost their looks, and their husbands were losing their power; and some of the youngest faculty and their spouses who wanted it made clear to everyone that as professors (even untenured), they ranked higher on the ladder of respect than a mere secretary. The older group snubbed Daphne by nodding and looking away without smiling; the younger group simply looked away, fast, almost terrified to make contact, afraid someone would think they were
friends
with a secretary.