Patricia Gaffney (6 page)

Besides, it wasn’t his heart rate that concerned him, it was the irregularity of the rhythm. His doctor had spotted it at his last checkup, and now that Andrew knew it was there he could easily discern it: His heart sped up when he breathed in, slowed down when he breathed out. “Perfectly harmless,” Dr. Bukowsky had said; “nothing to worry about. Very common, in fact.” Maybe; maybe not. If Edward hadn’t ignored breathlessness and fatigue for so long, who could say what condition his heart would be in today? One of the hundred or so ways in which Andrew tried not to be like his father was in the ignoring of symptoms.

“What’s that smell?”

Richard Weldon came in without knocking and threw himself down in the chair across Andrew’s desk. Andrew glanced at his watch: fourteen minutes until class, and Richard was a gasbag. “What smell?”

“Like a—Jesus, did you bring that dog again?”

Andrew rolled his chair back and looked down at the scruffy heap of Hobbes sleeping at his feet. Hobbes had lost his shape in his old age; he’d gone flat, like a damp bathroom rug. “He smells?”

“You can’t smell that? Jesus. It’s like an old well. An old abandoned mine.” Richard jumped up and began to prowl around the room, pulling out books on the shelves and pushing them back in. He was short and slight, not quite forty but almost bald, always pacing, cracking his knuckles, bouncing on his toes. He chaired department meetings in constant motion, circling the conference table in uneven jerks, never lighting.

“You’re looking well, Richard,” Andrew said pleasantly. “Like a man about to drop a great burden.”

“It’s not a great burden.” The corners of his mouth sagged in disapproval. “Not in the least. I’ve enjoyed the job. Hate to give it up. I wouldn’t, but it’s time to share.”

Share? Richard could hardly wait to relieve himself of the chairmanship. “I’m tired of it,” he’d told Andrew only a month ago, in a weak moment. “Sick of all the endless goddamn den-mothering.”

“How come you never have any pictures of Dash?” Richard asked, picking up one framed photograph after another from Andrew’s careful grouping, putting them back in the wrong places.

“Because she’s the photographer.”

“No, here’s one.” Richard reached up and pulled their wedding photo down from a top shelf. “Who took this one?”

“Dash’s mother.” They’d gotten married in Arlene’s house, spent their wedding night in her bedroom while she’d slept downstairs on the couch. Andrew’s father and stepmother had sent an expensive gift.

“Jesus, she looks about eighteen.” Richard smiled fondly. He liked Dash. A lot.

“She was twenty-five.” Andrew wished he would put the photo back. Richard didn’t know about the separation, and it made him uncomfortable to discuss Dash with him. Another lie he was almost telling. “Did you want something in particular, Richard? I’ve got a class in—”

“Right, I won’t hold you up, just wanted to put a bug in your ear.” He gave his nervous, throat-clearing laugh, put the photo back, and came over to the desk. “Here’s the deal.” His hands clamped the edge; he leaned in close, so close Andrew had an urge to pull on the goatee Richard had started growing over Thanksgiving. “I won’t beat around the bush.” He tugged on the Orioles cap someone had put on Andrew’s plaster bust of Thomas Jefferson. “Okay, here’s the thing. We’ve talked about it, and you’re it. You’re the one we want, but we’re not comfortable giving the job to an associate professor, it doesn’t look right. So you know what that means.”

“What job?”

Richard straightened. “The chair! So you’ll have to bite the bullet and write something good, something impressive. It’s the only way. Which you can easily do, and I’ve got an idea along those lines, too.”

Richard Weldon was offering him his job. Andrew couldn’t have been more astonished if he’d offered him his wife.

“
I
don’t want it.” He rolled backward on the wheels of his chair. He held up his hands, like a trampoline spotter. “Don’t give it to
me.
”

“Damn it, I knew you’d say that! Okay, okay, listen.” Richard grimaced, struggling to make his face patient again. “You don’t have to decide right away, this is just a feeler. But think about it. We want you, Andrew, you’re the man.”

“Who’s ‘we’?”

“Everybody I can get to agree on it.”

“Ah. Two people?” He relaxed; all was well. “I haven’t got time to write papers right now, Richard,” he said with feigned regret. “Gilded Age is going well, but it’s a lot tougher than I anticipated. It’s the first new class I’ve taught in a couple of years, and I didn’t take into account the learning curve.”

“Well, you wanted to teach it. I thought it was too much, but you insisted. So, in a way, you owe me.”

He ignored that. “Give it to Dominic. He
wants
the job.”

Richard’s face went red. “Brodsky would be a disaster, don’t even think about it.”

“He’s hard to get along with, yes, but—”

“Forget it. No, you’re the man.”

“Look, Richard. Apart from everything else, if I took on the chairmanship I’d have to give up two of my classes. Teaching is the part I
like.
”

“Yes, but think what you could do for the department.” Richard jolted up on the balls of his feet, making himself taller. “You’ve been saying for years we need to rejuvenate the history club, get the students more involved, get ’em active again. Here’s your chance! You stand for the students, that’s your strength, more than scholarship.
Even
more than scholarship,” he corrected hastily. “The pendulum swings back and forth, but only when somebody’s got his hand on it. I’ll admit, we’ve probably gone too far in the direction of research and publishing under my watch—so here’s a chance for you to move us back toward the center. And the young faculty—everybody knows how you feel about mentoring the assistants. You and Peter Flynn couldn’t be farther apart there.”

“No,” Andrew agreed. “Or on most other things.” But why had Richard brought up Flynn?

“Speaking of Peter,” the chairman said casually. “I’ve talked to him, and he’ll get on board for you, too.”

“I don’t think that’s likely.”

“No, you’re wrong. In fact, he says he’ll let you write a chapter for the book he’s editing. To help you get that leg up.”

“Peter Flynn will let me write a chapter for his book.” Andrew stood, began shoving notes and books into his briefcase. “How extraordinarily generous. Look, Richard, I’ve got to go.”
Brilliant
, just what he needed, Peter Flynn to the rescue.

“It is generous,” Richard insisted. “More important, it’s exactly what you need. It’ll get you over the hump, don’t you see? Put your prejudices aside, write this chapter, and you’ll get the full you need, I can almost guarantee it. You’re so
close.
”

“I don’t need a full professorship to chair the history department—
if
I wanted to chair it, which I don’t. Hobbes!” he shouted, to wake up the dog.

“I don’t get you. Here I am handing you two gifts on two separate platters, and you’re saying no. It’s not laziness—what is it? I’ve known a lot of TAPs, but you’re much brighter than that, always have been.”

“TAPs…?” Teaching assistants? Andrew looked at him quizzically.

“TAP—terminal associate professor.” Richard laughed. Then he turned red. “Don’t tell me you’ve never heard that term.”

The bell rang.

“This is just a beginning,” Richard said, giving him a chummy slap on the shoulder, letting him go through the door first. “It’s not a formal offer, just a feeler. We’ll talk again, keep the dialogue going. Let’s get a drink one night this week. We’ll talk again, Andrew.
Think
about it, that’s all!”

“Yes, all right,” he mumbled over his shoulder as he tugged on Hobbes’s leash, trying to make him go faster. TAP. The word kept him company all the way to his first-floor class; he set it to the rhythm of his footsteps. Smiling falsely at people he passed in the hall, it occurred to him why he’d never heard it before. Nobody used the word
terminal
around a dying person, either. Simple decency.

The worst was that there was no one to whom he could repeat this conversation. Not Dash, certainly; never, ever. And not even Tim Meese, his best friend in the department. Tim was as big a TAP as he was.

He could think of one person who would really enjoy hearing about it. His father would throw his head back and open his mouth in silent laughter, flaunting eighty years of fillings, bridges, and graying crowns. He’d slap his hands on his knees and grin up at him from his motorized wheelchair. “What’d I tell you?” he’d rasp. “Yes, sir, that’s my boy. I raised a TAP!”

“H
obbes!” cried Heather Kuhn, Andrew’s shiest student, when he brought the dog into the classroom and led him over to a sunny spot under the window. She even rose from her desk at the very back of the room to help get Hobbes settled. Heather was like a nursing-home resident who only comes to life on therapy pet day. “How is he?” she asked. “You haven’t brought him in lately, Dr. Bateman, so I was afraid…” She trailed off delicately. “Is he still lonely?”

The question puzzled him until he remembered: That was the excuse he’d used for bringing Hobbes to class last time, that he was lonely in the house by himself all day. It had seemed kinder to the old boy than “He pees on the rug if somebody doesn’t walk him every three hours.”

“Yes,” Andrew said solemnly, “still lonesome.”

“Maybe you could get him a playmate. Another dog for company.”

“Yeah, or a cat,” said Marshall Denny, reaching down from his desk to pet Hobbes’s graying haunch. “We had a dog who was thirteen when we got a kitten, and she perked him up, he lived three more years.”

“Good idea,” Andrew said, “except that I’m allergic to dogs. Hobbes is an anomaly.” What if Dash’s puppy had been an anomaly, too? Would she have stayed then, or would she have stumbled on another excuse to leave him—he drove too slowly, he left whiskers in the sink?

“Thomas Jefferson wasn’t much of a dog man,” he said in his professor’s voice, rising from a crouch beside Hobbes to some good-natured groaning at the obviousness of the segue. “He greatly admired the sheepdog, though. In fact, in 1809, his good friend Lafayette sent him two sheepdogs from France, and Jefferson immediately put them to work at Monticello. ‘Their sagacity is almost human,’ he wrote, ‘and qualifies them to be taught anything you please.’ Think about that, class. ‘Their sagacity is almost human’—do you see how relevant Jefferson still is? He could’ve been speaking of anyone in this
room.
”

Laughter, more groans. It was an excellent class. All history majors, although most of them would go on to careers in law, journalism, government. But a few would become teachers, and some of them would regard that as a comedown. Andrew never had. Teaching had always been his first choice, and it was always history. Nothing else had tempted him.

Today they were comparing Jefferson’s draft of the Declaration of Independence to Congress’s final version. “There’s a revolutionary sentiment in the second sentence,” he began, leaning against the blackboard. “Who knows what it is? Something brand new in the history of governmental doctrine.” The usual hands went up. He called on Heather, who never raised her hand but always knew the answer.

“The pursuit of happiness?” she guessed almost inaudibly.

“Correct. And why was it new? What was the old trifecta in political doctrine? Life, liberty, and…what?”

Even more softly: “Property?”

“Yes. Brilliant,” he declared, and Heather’s pale cheeks pinkened from pleasure and embarrassment.

“Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” piped up Derek Berenson from a front-row desk. “Unless you happened to be a
slave.
”

First Richard Weldon and Peter Flynn, now Berenson. Andrew brushed chalk off his hands and strolled over to the lectern. Defending Thomas Jefferson was a job he relished less and less because of the position it put him in: apologizing for a presumed racist. “Interesting point, Derek. We could spend the rest of the day discussing that, but let’s stay on topic for now.”

“But Jefferson owned slaves,” Berenson, a smart, good-looking, smooth-talking third-year student, persisted. “You could pursue happiness, but only if you were a white guy, right?”

“Well, it’s complicated. We’ll talk about it, because it’s important, but for now, let’s agree it would be an easy mistake to evaluate a historical figure using modern criteria. Judge an eighteenth-century man by twenty-first-century values, in other words.” The party line; it seldom failed. “At the moment, we’re discussing the drafting of a document that, however many flaws we might anachronistically find in it
now
, changed the course of history
then.
”

Evading difficult issues wasn’t his style, but he didn’t have the heart today for a debate over Jefferson’s racial ethics. Besides, it wouldn’t change anything. The winds were shifting. Not that he’d ever had much clout in the department—not that he’d wanted it—but seeing what little he did have slip away, like the painful passing of knots in a tug-of-war rope when you’re losing…it was demoralizing. If he was the old guard, Peter Flynn and his bunch were the new, and Andrew could feel their hot breath on the back of his neck, their loafer-shod toes on his heels, hounding him into obsolescence.