Roger's Version

I
 
i
 
I have been happy at the Divinity School. The hours are bearable, the surroundings handsome, my colleagues harmless and witty, habituated as they are to the shadows. To master a few dead languages, to parade sequential moments of the obdurately enigmatic early history of Christianity before classrooms of the hopeful, the deluded, and the docile—there are more fraudulent ways to earn a living. I consider my years spent in the active ministry, before meeting and marrying Esther fourteen years ago, if not exactly wasted, as a kind of pre-existence, the thought of which depresses me.
 
Yet when this young man called me at the school and, requesting an appointment, named my half-sister Edna’s daughter Verna as a friend of his, and he explained that he, like me, came from the Cleveland area, my wish to hang up was less strong than my curiosity. I named an afternoon and an hour, and so he came. The time was late October, a time in New England of golden leaves and tumultuous, luminous skies.
 
He was, I saw as he came in the door, the type of young man I like least: tall, much taller than I, and pale with an indoors passion. His waxy pallor was touched along the underside of his jaw with acne, like two brush burns, and his eyes in their deep bony sockets were an uncanny, sheepish, unutterably cold pale blue, pale almost to colorlessness. He had been wearing a wool knit navy-blue watch cap, which he stuffed into the pocket of his army-surplus camouflage jacket as he stood there awkwardly, taking up too much space and in his embarrassment blinking and looking around, at my bookshelves and through the lancet window beyond my head. His dirty-looking, somewhat curly brown hair, I could see at his temples, was already beginning to thin.
 
“These are lovely buildings,” he said. “I’ve never been to this part of the university before.”
 
“It’s a bit out of the way,” I told him, wishing it were even more so. “Where do you normally, uh, hang out?”
 
“Computer labs, sir; I’m a research assistant for a special graphics project the Cube has taken on on a combined government and private-sector grant. Artificial intelligence is what the higher-ups down there really care about—you know, yoking hundreds of minis together to modulize the problem, trying to develop rules that keep the search tree from expanding exponentially, using heuristics to generate new heuristics, and so on. But in the meantime it’s data processing and bionics and now graphics that keep the wheels greased, or the bread buttered, or whatever.”
 
I am a depressive. It is very important for my mental well-being that I keep my thoughts directed away from areas of contemplation that might entangle me and pull me down. The young man had, with his computer-talk, conjured up just such an area. The Cube is the jocular local name for the University Computer Research Center, which is housed in a new building whose edges are all equal in length. I have never entered it, nor do I hope to. I smiled, and told him, “We haven’t yet introduced ourselves. I, of course, am Roger Lambert.”
 
“Dale Kohler, sir. I really appreciate your seeing me.” His handshake was just as I expected: bony, cool as wax, and too earnestly firm in its grip. He did not seem to want to let go.
 
“Let’s sit down. You said you know my sister’s daughter, Verna. I’m very curious to know how she’s doing. Very. That was a set of shocking developments.”
 
In sitting opposite me in the official wooden armchair the university provides to hundreds of its offices and rooms (each element, an accompanying brochure boasts, carved of a different wood—the seat of adamant oak, the spindles of fine-grained maple, the curved arms of ruddy cherry, and so on), the boy somehow got a pocket of his camouflage jacket caught, and there was a certain amount of apologetic heaving and writhing before he was settled. His knuckles and wrists looked huge, morbidly enlarged. I judged his age to be in the late twenties; he was no fledgling student. You see many of them in a university town, these people who settle into the casual uniform and cunning ingenuousness of the youthful learner as though it is a permanent, and paying, profession. Some grow gray hair and great bushy tails of ill-fed progeny while still innocently pursuing knowledge.
 
“Which do you mean was shocking?” asked the young man, who, awkward as he seemed, had something challenging, something of impudence and insinuation, about him. He offered me a choice: “The race of the father, the fact that the father has copped out, or the crummy way her parents have treated her?”
 
I took offense. All of us at the university are racially liberal. “The race, of course, was and is dandy, other things being equal. But since they so clearly weren’t, I was surprised that the child went ahead and had the baby.”
 
My visitor shifted weight, like a man with too full a wallet in his hip pocket, and I was reminded to reach for my pipe. “Well …” he began.
 
The pleasures of a pipe. The tapping, the poking, the twisting, the cleaning, the stuffing, the lighting: those first cheek-hollowing puffs, and the dramatic way the match flame is sucked deep into the tobacco, leaps high in release, and is sucked deep again. And then the mouth-filling perfume, the commanding clouds of smoke. Oddly, I find the facial expressions and mannerisms of other men who smoke pipes stagy, prissy, preening, and offensive. But ever since I, as an unheeded admonition to Esther some years ago, gave up cigarettes, the pipe has been my comfort, my steeplejack’s grab, my hand hold on the precipitous cliff of life.
 
“Once she was pregnant,” he confided to me out of his lopsided slouch, “it was a religious decision.” His face—his uncanny long face with its swipes of acne and a curious unshaven fuzz high on the same jaws, an incipient fur vivid in the light from the tall window behind my head—expressed displeasure at my smoke. This generation, which by and large has lost all inculturated instinct for the Judaeo-Christian sacral, has displaced much of its religiosity onto anti-pollution, ranging from the demand for smoke-free zones in restaurants to violent demonstrations in front of nuclear-power plants.
 
“Religious?” I framed the word between aggressive moist puffs on my pipe.
 
“Sure. Not to kill it.”
 
“You’re of the same school of thought, then, as our President?”
 
“I’m not saying I am, I’m just saying Verna’s not getting an abortion had some reasoning and feeling behind it, but now …”
 
“Now?” The tobacco was still burning on only one side of the bowl. I began to feel cross-eyed—another of those habitual expressions that irritate me in my fellow pipe-smokers.
 
“Now it’s not so good, sir. The little girl’s about one and a half, and I guess that’s a demanding age, at least Verna says the kid is driving her crazy, babbling and getting into things all the time. She says it clings to her and I say to her, What else do you expect it to do, go out and get a job? I try to swing by once or twice a week at least; but this project she’s living in … I don’t want to sound racist—”
 
“Yes?”
 
“It’s not a good place. She has no real friends.”
 
“Odd,” I offered (the pipe smoothly functioning at last), “her decision to come here to live.”
 
“Well … I don’t know how much you know.”
 
“Very little. My father divorced and remarried when I was very small—the precipitating affair had evidently been progressing while my mother was pregnant with me—and with his new wife, he had this little girl, this other child, scarcely a year after I was born. I used to see her, my sister, or half-sister I should say, only when visiting him—sometimes, I admit, for as much as a month during summer vacations. So Edna and I didn’t grow up together at all in the ordinary sense; and I scarcely knew her own family, once she married, living as they all did in Cleveland Heights. Her husband and Verna’s father, as she may have already described to you, is this quite rigidly philistine, cold-blooded brute of Norwegian descent called Paul Ekelof who works as an engineer and now is some sort of executive at one of the Republic steel plants down in the Flats, along the river—why am I telling you all this?”
 
“Because I’m interested,” Dale Kohler said. His pious smile was insufferable.
 
“I’m almost done. Edna had Verna rather late in life—she was well past thirty—and I was long gone, first as a minister, and then as a professor. So, yes, I saw the child very little, and didn’t know what was expected of me when my sister, my half-sister, wrote me over a year ago to say how upset they had been with Verna, and that she had moved to here, of all places.”
 
“Well,” Dale said, yet again, “it’s East, and I think she thought, with the half-black child, it might be more tolerant, being a university town, and also I think Verna thought there would be a lot to do—art films, free lectures. She and I met, for instance, at this symposium on Nicaragua at a Congregational church. We got to talking over the Kool-Aid and discovered we were fellow Buckeyes! Also, I think she wanted to put distance between herself and her parents, she was so angry with them. Not that Cleveland is that far away any more; they have these nonstop flights, you used to have to come down in Pittsburgh, and if you go standby it’s almost as cheap as the bus.”
 
One’s time is hard to put a value on: much of it, clearly and inevitably, is spent to no immediate profit, and one of the Christian consolations, as I construe them, is that the Lord’s unsleeping witness and strict accountancy redeems all moments from pointlessness, just as His Son’s sacrifice redeemed Time in the larger sense. But my time, surely, was ill-spent in sitting and listening to the praises of the scheduled air service to Cleveland, that most dismal and forsaken of rust-belt metropolises, to which nothing but funerals has induced me, for thirty years, to return. Why was this young man seeming to suggest that I should fly back there, back to that muggy, suffocating heartland? Why was he here at all? How had we become entangled, in this sudden stilted intimacy?