Richard Russo - Nobody's Fool

And awful as that was, it would have remained longing and admiration, except that in August of what would be Sully’s senior year, Sully’s older brother had gotten drunk and killed himself in a head-on collision late one Saturday night on the way home from Schuyler Springs. Clive Sr. had felt bad for Sully, who took it hard, and he also felt bad for his football team, which needed a focused Sully. Everyone knew what the boy’s home life was like, his father a drunken barroom brawler, his mother a cowed little mouse of a woman whose slender comfort derived from the Catholic church where she confessed her husband’s sins in the cool darkness of the confessional where you couldn’t see her black eyes. So Clive Sr. had invited Sully over to dinner one evening and later that night told him he was welcome anytime, an invitation Sully took literally. He became, for the rest of the football season, a fixture in their dining room. The first few nights Miss Beryl set an extra place for him when he arrived. Then, after a week, she decided it was easier to just set Sully’s place in the beginning. The boy clearly preferred the Peoples family, their table, their food, to that of his own now diminished family.

Actually, it was Clive Jr.’s job to set the table, and in this way he was made an unwilling accomplice, forced to welcome the intruder into their home. By the time Sully was a senior, Clive Jr. was himself in high school and the ambiguous longing he’d felt when he looked at Sully two years before had mutated into an equally impossible longing to be more like Sully, who was dating the new object of his desire, Joyce Freeman, a junior who was far too good-looking and popular to talk to. And so Clive Jr. hadn’t the slightest desire for Sully to join their family, where Clive Jr.’s own light already shown dimly enough under the bushel of his parents’ disappointment in him. And so Clive Jr. did everything he could think of to suggest to Sully that he was not welcome. If there was a chipped plate, Clive Jr. set it where Sully would be seated. If there was a fork with a bent tine, Sully got that too, along with the glass that hadn’t come quite clean the night before. The inference should have been clear to anyone, but Sully seemed oblivious, incapable of registering any slight. If the bent tine of the fork jabbed him in the lip, he simply straightened the offending prong between his grubby thumb and forefinger, held it up to the light to make sure all the tines were lined up and said, “There, you little rat.” Since Clive Jr. had been the one who bent the tine dangerously to begin with, Sully, speaking to the fork, seemed to be speaking to him.

Midway through football season Clive Sr. seemed to understand that he’d made a mistake inviting Sully into their home. He didn’t say anything, but Clive Jr. could tell his father knew he’d goofed. The idea had been to make Sully a better citizen, a better team player. Clive Sr. had seen an opportunity to take one of his pivotal players home with him and extend practice sessions over the dinner table, get the boy thinking straight, to understand he was part of something bigger than himself, that the team came first. That, Clive Sr. was confident, would also stand Sully in good stead in the larger context of life. “The larger context of life” was one of Clive Sr.’s favorite phrases. Everything that took place on a football field was applicable to The Larger Context of Life in Clive Sr.’s view, and this was what he wanted Sully to grasp.

What Clive Sr. hadn’t anticipated was that Sully would find a natural subversive ally in Miss Beryl. True, his wife had always made gentle fun of Clive Sr.’s most serious themes, but he hadn’t imagined she’d thwart his design to educate Sully. If that’s what she was doing. Which Clive Sr. couldn’t be sure. It seemed to him that his wife must be up to something subversive, even though he couldn’t put his finger on any single thing she was doing that warranted specific reprimand. Mostly, it was little things, like calling Sully “Donald” instead of “Don” or “Sully,” the names — men’s names — that everyone else called him. Clive Sr. didn’t like his heaviest hitter thinking of himself as “Donald,” though he wasn’t sure he wanted to raise this issue with Miss Beryl because he could hear her snort in his mind and knew how he’d feel when he heard it for real in his ears. There were some things women just didn’t understand and you couldn’t teach them and were better off not trying.

But it wasn’t just the business of calling Sully “Donald.” What he’d had in mind was a dinner table at which two sportsmen — himself and Sully — would talk strategy about their next opponent in such a way that his own son, who would never be an athlete, might become more educated and aware of, albeit vicariously, the sporting life and the lessons of sport. What he had not anticipated was that every night Sully would become involved in conversations not with himself, but rather with Miss Beryl, conversations about books and politics and the war America wasn’t going to be able to stay out of much longer, subjects that somehow diminished football and therefore its lessons about The Larger Context of life.

It was as if his wife were bent on undermining every lesson in citizenship that Clive Sr. was trying to impart. Gertrude Wynoski had been a case in point. For many years the junior high school social studies teacher, Mrs. Wynoski was, to Miss Beryl’s mind, a crackpot. Her particular area of interest was local history, and until her forced retirement she’d drawn for every seventh-grade student at Bath Junior High a parallel between Schuyler Springs and Babylon, claiming that the latter’s prosperity was built on a precarious foundation of moral corruption. After her retirement, feeling the loss of her captive audience, she commenced to share her views with the citizens of Bath in a series of jeremiads published in the Letters to the Editor section of the North Bath Weekly Journal , reminding all and sundry that Schuyler Springs’ good fortune had its roots in immorality. That community had always condoned every form of gambling, legal and illegal, from horseraces to cockfights to savage prizefights and for decades had even tolerated the existence of a particularly infamous whorehouse. “House of ill repute” was actually the term she used, much to the confusion of her seventh-graders, for whom the phrase remained opaque, Mrs. Wynoski demurring exegesis. Her readers at the North Bath Weekly Journal followed her drift, and she concluded all of her epistles with strong hints that it was only a matter of time before Schuyler Springs was visited by some form of retribution, possibly biblical in nature.

Clive Sr., who loved Bath and felt out of place in Schuyler Springs, especially during the tourist season, privately inclined toward Mrs. Wynoski’s view. As football coach, he felt an obligation to take the moral view, and he wanted badly to believe in a moral world. What he wished for more than anything was that the comeuppance Mrs. Wynoski predicted for Schuyler Springs would come, if God willed, at the hands of his football team. The Schuyler team was always rumored to have players who did not actually reside in the city, and Clive Sr. didn’t mind sharing these rumors with his student athletes in the hope of spurring them to moral outrage. They were cheaters, he said, and cheaters never prospered. This was the point he’d been trying to make one night at the dinner table, the subject of cheating having been raised by the publication of another Wynoski letter. He’d hoped Miss Beryl might champion this view.

“Cheaters always prosper, you mean,” his wife had corrected him before his voice had even dropped. Moreover, she continued, if Schuyler Springs was built on a foundation of gambling and sin, there was no reason to expect the edifice to crumble anytime soon. There was nothing in the least shaky about such foundations, she said. If anything was shaky, it was Gert Wynoski’s intellectual dexterity. Finally, there was no reason to wait for God to speak on the subject of Schuyler Springs. The evidence rather suggested he had already spoken, and it was Bath’s springs that had run dry.