Robert Calder: The Dogs

The sun was vigorous and the air tangy, the leaves were new. It was a day for poignant response, but Bauer couldn't rise to it: ennui was the enemy.

Students were lunching in the shade of a big oak. The architect had saved the tree as a visual anchor. It was counter weighted on a diagonal across the quadrangle by the squat, brick Tully English Hall.

Two dogs lay among the students, heads resting between paws and eyes following the movement of hands to mouths. They lunged when scraps fell. Another animal wandered aimlessly. It sniffed and stopped to paw the ground, shied away from the occasional student who tried to coax it near.

In the center of the quad a black Labrador raced beneath a Frisbee.

Each time the disc was thrown too wide or too far, the dog spurted after it, leapt and snatched it from the air and landed in stride, circled away with the prize held high. Two smaller dogs followed with envious yaps.

The Labrador slowed to tease them, then bowled them over with its shoulder, or streaked away again. It returned the Frisbee to one of the players and wagged its tail, charged off on the next throw.

Several dogs frequented the campus. Some were owned, most simply wandered from apartment to rented house, staying a while, and a few were vagabonds that appeared at intervals to accept a handout or raid a garbage can, or, less frequently, stand for a little affection. Last fall a yellow cur had bitten a faculty wife and her child. A state trooper came out and shot the dog and took it into Covington to be checked for rabies. The dog was clean, but still a county health officer arrived to address a student assembly on the issue of stray and ownerless dogs, which was a heated one in Covington.

His visit had no discernible effect.

Bauer crossed the quad to Tully Hall, a two-story building that vaulted over a passageway. Ivy grew up its sides. Bauer's office was on the second floor. It had a tall window through which cheerful light flooded in the late spring and the summer. In winter, the sun moved to the other side and the office was awash in dim grayness. He'd painted the walls yellow, but it hadn't warmed the winter.

He took a stack of bluebooks from the end of a bookshelf and sat down at his desk to grade them, typing out a paragraph of comment on each one and stapling it to the inside back cover. This was an open conference hour, but he didn't expect anyone to drop in. Only half a dozen students from all his classes had sought him out the last trimester, and of those, one had been seeking therapy, not academic counsel. That was a joke, Bauer as psychological adviser; he feared the boy would open himself too deeply, that it would go out of control, and he recoiled from the possibility of responsibility. In the end he'd functioned as a sympathetic friend (though that was a stance; if anything, he was put off by the boy's self-pity). He didn't know whether he'd helped or not. The kid had dropped out.

He came to Lesley Burrows' book-she was a private, intense student-and remembered that he'd promised to speak to Farrell for her. He went over to the other wing. Farrell's door was closed. He knocked.

"Yes?"

Bauer opened the door and leaned in. Farrell, in jacket and tie-he was one of the few professors who wore them-was with a student.

"Excuse me. I'd like to see you when you have a minute."

Farrell seemed to weigh this. "All right," he said. "Wait in the hall, will you?"

"Sure."

Bauer lit a cigarette. No one paid any attention to the NO SMOKING signs, not even the janitors who had to sweep up the butts. He coughed. He'd quit, with difficulty, a decade ago, picked them up again when DiGiovanni had been arrested.

He waited fifteen minutes, half of them after the student had left.

That was Farrell's style. Alone, he'd tell you he had pressing matters, be so kind as to wait. If you telephoned, he was in the middle of something, and a day or two would pass before he'd return the call.

"Come in, Alex."

Farrell ran his cuffs and filled a pipe from a tooled humidor. He tamped and lit it and puffed until it burned evenly. Then he swiveled his chair to face Bauer. Behind him, gilded old editions of the Elizabethans and Jacobeans were carefully ranked on walnut shelves. Hung on the flanking walls were framed pages from the Wintergreen Poetry Review, of which Farrell was editor, inscribed to him by the authors.

"What is it?"

"I have a student named Lesley Burrows who-"

"Yes. She applied for English-H next term. I turned her down."

"She's qualified," Bauer said.

"You're the only one who thinks so. She barely scraped through her other classes."

"She's been out of school a while. She's still feeling her way."

"Are you feeling her?"

Bauer ignored him. "Look, she's bright as hell."

"We are talking about an Honors course," Farrell said. "She is not an Honors student. The answer seems clear, doesn't it?"

"No. She's well read, and she can write. She wants the course, it will be good for her and she can handle it."

"I'm surprised a student would invest any confidence in you. I once suggested to Conde that your background would make a lively focus for a class. It offers certain interesting moral and ethical reticulations, don't you think?"

"Not to anyone but me."

"Oh you're wrong there. The New York Review of Books mentioned you in conjunction with that case in Detroit. And in Philadelphia, the government has cited your testimony as part of their argument."

"I want Lesley Burrows in that class, Farrell."

"Firmness of purpose. Resolve. Those are admirable qualities, Alex.

Continue to work on them: sometimes they can lend you integrity and strength of character. Not that I don't sympathize with you-it must be hellish to weigh yourself and learn you're wanting in the balance."

To find passion, to hold conviction, God how lovely that would be. He said,

"You're an asshole."

"Possibly, but at least one of principle."

Dauer dropped two manuscripts on Farrell's desk. "These qualify the girl.

If you don't think so, then I'll take it up with Pritchard."

He started to leave.

Farrell said, "I ran into Ursula in town yesterday. One thing I can't fault is your taste in women. We went for a drink. Should I say hello for you next time?"

"Sure, we know each other." Bauer closed the door behind himself.

Farrell's wife Hilary had pursued Bauer with the enthusiasm of a sportful porpoise when he came to Wintergreen. It was no particular flattery since nearly everyone without breasts excited her. This happily excused Farrell his own philanderings, which were many. As cocktail chatter, Farrell explained that he was married only in a technical sense-Hilary was his housekeeper, cook, and secretary, and whatever primitive pleasures she found for her simpleminded self were of no more consequence to him than the amusements of a domestic.

Farrell devoted much energy to skirting the pit of bitterness that was his core-bitterness that Cambridge had rejected him in his graduate days, that there was no chair for him at Harvard, that his little book on Herrick had been panned by his peers.

Bauer's class was lively. This term he was teaching an American Lit course.

He wasn't qualified, but they were one short in the department.

Pritchard, the chairman, who could have retired years ago but who was hanging on for the single purpose of keeping the chairmanship out of the hands of Farrell, whom he detested, had told Bauer not to worry about it. "You're literate, right? You're intelligent, right? So read the good criticism and you can teach them as well as anyone. This is a survey course, that's all. Don't worry about it." And Pritchard had been right, which, in a way, disappointed Bauer. His apprehension had been a bright splash of color on the landscape of his malaise.