Тимоти Уилльямз - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 126, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 769 & 770, September/October 2005

He closed the door of the classroom and went home to his own Xanthieppe.

As usual, Reva met him at the door with her recital of everything that had gone wrong during the day. The neighbor’s dog had turned over the garbage can again and she’d spent a good half-hour cleaning up the mess, the phone had rung four times with “those terrible telemarketers trying to scam me into buying some worthless doodad or contribute to some nonexistent cause,” and the disposal wasn’t working right and the kitchen sink was backed up with mess.

“Did you call a repairman?” he asked.

“Why should I?” she demanded. “You know they come quicker when a man calls. For a woman, they take their own sweet time.”

“I’ll call first thing in the morning,” he said wearily, putting his hat on the hall table and heading for the living room, where he hoped to spend a quiet time reading the newspaper while whatever frozen thing she had in the oven cooked for his dinner. He had become an authority on baked boxes and boiled bags.

He sank into his favorite chair and decided he was too tired even to pick up the paper.

Had it always been like this? he wondered. Had he always felt like the zenith of failure? In college, he had been considered a scholar, a deep thinker who graduated in the top ten percent of a class of two thousand. He had always known he wanted to teach and to write, so he went on for a master’s, and planned to go for a Ph.D. following that. But halfway through the master’s course, he met Reva. She was a cute little thing, shining black hair, dark eyes that almost looked black, and a smile that showed two fetching dimples. He had dated off and on during college, but never seriously, because he was as short of small talk as he was money. What he knew most about was philosophy, and unfortunately, the girls he dated were not philosophers. But Reva was different. She yakked on like the current fad of chatty dolls. She was a junior, but hadn’t decided on a major. “I like the social side of college,” she said. “The rest is just high school all over again.” No scholar she, but she had something his other dates didn’t have: a desire to be with him.

And so one cold night in early December, they ended up in the backseat of his ancient Chevrolet.

The second week of January, only a few days after the Christmas holiday, she told him she was pregnant. He smiled, thinking she was making a silly little joke. When she didn’t return the smile, he was stunned, shocked into total silence.

“We’ll have to get married,” she said. “Right away. And we’ll have to tell my folks we’ve been married since before Christmas.”

“But — but I’m right in the middle of my master’s.” It was all he could think of to say. His father had paid part of his college tuition and he had worked odd jobs, but once he had the diploma, he was on his own. His advanced degrees would have to be paid for by him and him alone.

“So get the bloody master’s,” she said. “I’ll drop out and use this semester’s tuition for a place to live.”

Back in those days, he mused, if you got a girl pregnant, you married her. Abortion wasn’t an option, because it wasn’t legal. So they were married by a J.P. in Maryland, and three weeks later Reva told him she wasn’t pregnant after all. False alarm. Nor had she become pregnant in the thirty years since.

He got the master’s and that was the end of his formal education. For a couple of years he was an assistant to an associate professor of philosophy at the university, but it hardly paid a living wage. Next, he went to a private high school, where the pay was better, but he had to teach history because there were no philosophy classes. Then Reva told him about Miss Painter’s School, where her best friend’s two daughters were enrolled. It was a junior college and the pay was the best he’d had. And he taught philosophy. Six years later, the school went bankrupt because of limited enrollment, and once again, he was looking. His choices were few; universities wanted Ph.D.s and even small colleges preferred them. In the classifieds of an educational journal he found an ad for Barclay, answered, and had been teaching there ever since. Girls from fourteen to eighteen. Not what he had visualized when he had been young and idealistic.

From the time he entered the university as a freshman, he had wanted to be a teacher, a professor. He had dreamed of standing before a class of eager young men and women, telling them of the capacity of thought, the deep and marvelous conclusions of the Early Thinkers. He remembered fragments of a poem he had once read, by Sara Teasdale, he thought, something about “children’s faces looking up, / Holding wonder like a cup.” That’s the way his students’ faces would be: holding the wonder of the new knowledge being given to them.

But no, life had dealt him a lousy, losing hand and he was getting tired of trying to play it.

“Travis, come to dinner.” Reva stood in the doorway scowling at him. “This is the second time I’ve called you. Were you asleep?”

“I wish,” he said, getting up and following her to the dining room.

Dinner over, he sank into his lounge chair, which Reva constantly threatened to throw out with the trash because it was old and worn. (He suspected the real reason was that the chair held his firm imprint.) He skimmed through the newspaper, reading about the wars and rumors of wars, murders, murder-suicides, rapes, and robberies, and decided those men in long white robes topped with sandwich boards predicting the end of the world probably had the inside scoop. Why would a God want to rule over such as this? He threw the newspaper aside and picked up Great Dialogues of Plato.

Are good people good by nature or by learning? If virtue is knowledge, can it be taught? Questions of Socrates, reported by Plato.

But he, himself, had a question he had hoped for years some student would ask, but so far, none had. Did Plato himself ever have an original thought, or should every profundity be attributed to Socrates, pirated by Plato? For several years he had thought about writing a book on the subject, but somehow just never got around to doing it.

Time which once had meandered by in a slow walk now sped like a racer headed for the finish line.

He dozed...

Reva was shaking his shoulder. “Wake up, Travis. There’s a woman on the porch to see you. Didn’t you hear the doorbell?”

“Who?” he asked.

“Never saw her before. Said her name is Dalroy.”

Vivian! he thought. Had his best student found something puzzling in the assignment that she wanted to talk over with him? He hurried to the porch.

Standing under the porch light was not his favorite student, but an older version of her. The woman had the same reddish-brown hair, though on closer scrutiny, her color did not look quite real. She stared back at him through pink tortoiseshell glasses.

“Professor Penley, I am Miriam Dalroy, Vivian’s mother.”

She did not return his smile and when he held out his hand, she ignored it.

“Vivian?” he asked, concerned. “Is she all right? Has something happened?”

“I imagine you know what’s happened better than I do.”

If looks could kill, he would now be on his way to the under-taker’s. What was it with this woman?

“Won’t you come in?” He stepped back from the door, holding it ajar.

“What I have to say is better said right here, unless you want your wife to know.”

He closed the door. “What are you talking about?” His pulse had sped up some; he could feel it beating in his temples.

“Don’t be coy with me, you old letch. You know exactly what I’m talking about. Do you hit on all your students, or is my daughter the only one to be given this singular honor?”