Jane Smiley - Some Luck

Lillian would have said later that she thought long and hard about her next remark, but she really paused for only a second or two. She said, “Arthur put him up to it. They — we — were suspicious of her, and Arthur got Frank to check her out, and Frank decided that the suspicions were valid. And then they got her. Hoover hates her with a black passion. But in the end, that’s why she got off, because he tracked her every move without a warrant.”

“Hoover who?”

“J. Edgar.”

“Oh, good Lord!”

“Frank didn’t like her much,” said Lillian. “She baked him a cake for his birthday, and then he broke up with her twenty minutes later.” She thought this would be reassuring for Andy. “It was all business for him.”

Andy didn’t say anything.

Lillian said, “I don’t think you should hold it against him. Do you hold it against him?”

“I don’t think anything about it right now. It’s too … But, Lillian, Arthur works for the …?” She waited for Lillian to answer, and so Lillian finally said, “Doesn’t everyone? At least around here. Anyway …”

But there was no “anyway.” When she was feeding Dean up in her room, an hour or so later, and feeling deeply embarrassed for being such a babbling idiot, Lillian decided that it was the storm that got to her, the storm that was getting louder and more violent by the hour. You never knew what you were going to do in a big storm. After Dean finished the bottle, she lay down in the bed and pulled the comforter up, snuggling with him, closing her eyes, and giving thanks that they were in Georgetown, not Usherton; if the house blew away or something bad happened, at least people would know it right away.

HENRY HADN’T TOLD Mama or Papa yet what he was majoring in. As far as they knew, he was going to be a doctor or a dentist. Or he could go on to Davenport and go to Palmer. All Mama knew was that there wasn’t a doctor within thirty miles of Denby who had any up-to-date training at all, so a bookish boy like Henry, who had lived for eighteen years on a farm and still didn’t know how to drive a tractor, could make himself more than useful in some sort of medical profession.

But science did nothing for Henry. He had seen more fetal pigs in his day than any of the other biology students, and he had never seen one that he wanted to slit down the belly. He also had to go to the dental school and have four cavities filled by student dentists, one of whom talked incessantly while drilling, and then, when the professor came over to inspect the fillings, he let out a little cluck. Henry knew that the student would be getting a D. But there was no offer to replace them. If Henry had felt any desire to take up dentistry, it vanished completely.

Of course he liked his English-literature class, and of course he wrote his papers with speed and enthusiasm. The first semester, they read “The Miller’s Tale” and “The Wife of Bath’s Tale,” Everyman , Book Three of Le Morte d’Arthur , about Sir Lancelot, Doctor Faustus, Othello, King Lear, Twelfth Night, The Duchess of Malfi, ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, Pilgrim’s Progress , and, in the last two weeks, the first half of Paradise Lost . Over Christmas break, he finished that and went on to Robinson Crusoe and Pamela . By the end of the year, they were to get to Oscar Wilde, which was fine with Henry. The real benefit of the class, though, was that he met Professor McGalliard, and now, in the second semester, he was having a private tutorial in Old English, or Anglo-Saxon, or whatever you wanted to call it. After Christmas, he had brought that stolen copy of Beowulf back to Iowa City with him, and he kept it under his mattress. (He did not think his roommates would care if he had a book from the North Usherton High School library — their room was decked with street signs, girls’ underwear, ripped banners from other Big Ten schools — the Ohio State banner had been defaced in several ways — and even two hubcaps from the homecoming game against Northwestern.) He got along with his roommates fine, but neither of them knew something that Henry was proud and fascinated to know, that “foot” had originated in the Caucasus as ped and was of course related to the Latin pes, pedis , the Greek pous , the Sanskrit pád , and German Fu β , that the “p” turned into an “f” by means of Grimm’s law. “Ball” had originated as bhel , meaning “to swell,” and was related not only, of course, to “bellows” but also to “follicle” and “phallus.” The Grimm in question was Jacob Grimm himself, who was also responsible for “Little Red Riding Hood” and “Clever Hans,” those stories that, in time-honored fashion, Lillian had only half remembered, and so had told to him in mixed-up and made-up versions (during one of their sessions, he related to Professor McGalliard the story of the wolf prince, his favorite).

Professor McGalliard was kind and encouraging. He had gone to Harvard, and seemed a bit perplexed about finding himself in Iowa City. He only let Henry do etymologies for part of the session — the first job was to learn to read basic texts like The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles and “The Seafarer.” Beowulf was to be saved for next year, when Henry had a better ear for the rhythm of the line. In the meantime, Henry was also taking German, and in the fall he was going to sign up for Latin. Eventually, there would be Greek, too, once he got hideous wastes of time out of the way like calculus and American history. You could only take medieval history as a junior, but there were plenty of books in the library that he could read on his own, such as Medieval Cities: Their Origins and the Revival of Trade and A History of the Franks by Gregory of Tours. It was pretty clear that he was going to have to improve his French, too, not because French itself was a language he was interested in, but because all of the best work was in French — Marc Bloch, that sort of thing. Professor McGalliard seemed rather amused at his enthusiasm, especially when Henry mentioned that he’d been raised on a farm. “I hardly ever went outside,” said Henry, to reassure him, but he just laughed at that.

As for the other freshmen, Henry could not quite figure out why they were at college. His roommates, Forrest and Allen, were from Council Bluffs and Fort Dodge. They ate and slept Hawkeyes, and were furious that the president of the university would not or could not hire a decent football coach. Iowa hadn’t won the Big Ten title in thirty years. Henry was taller than Forrest and outweighed Allen by fifteen pounds. Neither of them would ever play football ( pes bhel ), but they talked about it every day. Forrest thought he was going to major in business, and Allen had no idea. They slept through classes as a matter of course and talked about girls all the time, though they never actually talked to girls. As for the girls, Henry liked girls well enough. Did he not get along perfectly with Lillian and quite well with Claire? He knew how to talk to girls, and he often watched them, but college girls were not like girls he’d known before. The particular problem was one of vocal timbre. His skin prickled when they made certain squawking or screeching sounds, and in bars and in the commons, they seemed to make these sounds a majority of the time. He went out sometimes with girls who were a little calmer than most, but, unfortunately, when they asked him what he was studying, he forgot and told them. Inevitably, their jaws dropped, and that was the end of that. Henry didn’t care. When he told Mama and Lillian that he loved college, that he was perfectly happy with his part-time job reshelving books in the library, and that he was dating off and on (he did take a girl from Davenport to the Christmas dance, and they looked great in the photograph), he knew they were imagining a life that he was not living. But that was fine. There was a ghost in him that would someday emerge from those books that he could not yet read, and that, he knew, would be the real Henry Langdon.